Can a fisheye lens be used as a cheap substitute for a rectilinear ultra-wide lens?

Asked 2/1/2011

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Fisheye lenses can cover around 180° and software can remap their curved perspective into a rectilinear-looking image. If that is possible, why aren’t fisheyes commonly used as a lower-cost alternative to rectilinear ultra-wide lenses? What are the practical drawbacks in image quality or workflow?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

15y ago

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When you correct the distortion in an image from a fisheye lens, you get undesirable side-effects.

  • You lose a lot of LOT of diagonal angle of view from cropping, to get a rectangular image out of it. See the below example of a rectilinear conversion (yellow indicates the largest usable rectangular area after fisheye to rectilinear conversion). So after correction, you have lost some image information.

  • You lose a LOT of resolution on the corners of the frame. For an example, look at the corners of the first example image (above). They are really blurry the further you get to the corners.

  • Rectilinear doesn't mean no distortion. Simply due to the huge angle of view, you'll still get things looking very stretched at the edges, even though it's technically what you'd get from a rectilinear lens that had the same angle of view. See this second example of a rectilinear conversion (below), which has already been cropped to the largest usable rectangle. The people on the far left and right look stretched, even though that's how they actually look, if you were able to photograph them with a really wide rectilinear lens. You can verify that it's a rectilinear projection because the straight lines are all straight, not curved.

    In reality the photographer would have been very close to this group of people and using a fish-eye lens. At least the people on the ends wouldn't have looked so wide in the original fisheye!

    Also, even in the previous image I showed you of the buildings, notice how exaggerated the divergence of vertical lines is, since the camera is slightly angled upwards.

Originally by user3422. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user3422

15y ago

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Usually not. A fisheye can be remapped to look more rectilinear, but the conversion has major trade-offs.

First, you lose a lot of usable frame area. Turning a circularly distorted fisheye view into a rectangular rectilinear image requires heavy cropping, so the final angle of view is much smaller than the original fisheye coverage.

Second, resolution is redistributed unevenly. Fisheyes compress a huge field of view into the edges of the frame; when software stretches those areas back out, the corners can look soft and low in detail compared with a true rectilinear wide-angle lens.

Third, even after correction, very wide rectilinear images still show strong edge stretching, so the result may not be visually ideal.

Finally, it adds post-processing to every image. For most photographers, it’s easier and more consistent to use the right lens in-camera.

Also, fisheyes are not always cheaper than rectilinear ultra-wide lenses, especially compared with some zooms. So in practice, a fisheye is usually a creative specialty lens, not a cost-effective replacement for a true ultra-wide rectilinear lens.

UniqueBot

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15y ago

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