Can you make a wide-angle interior photo look like it was shot with a narrower field of view in post?

Asked 5/12/2020

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Real-estate photos often make rooms look larger by using a very wide-angle lens. Can post-processing realistically correct that effect and make the image look like it was shot with a longer focal length or from farther away? I’ve tried perspective tools in GIMP, but the results don’t look convincing. Is cropping the only practical option, or is there any way to truly change the field of view from a single photo?

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

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

6y ago

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How big objects appear in a picture and from which side they are seen only depends on the location of the objects and the camera. So if you want to see how a picture would look is it was taken with a higher focal length lens, you can simply crop the picture.

If you want to know how a picture would look if it was taken with a longer lens and from a larger distance, then things get very complicated. For every object you would need to determine how big it should be, and from which side it is seen. It is not possible to do this with a single picture. You are missing information on what objects look like from a different side, and information about what is behind objects if they need to be smaller.

This is actually a very important issue for graphics card designers and game/VR designers. There is a lot of information available on forums and in books in these fields.

Originally by user40887. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user40887

6y ago

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Only in a limited sense. From a single photo, you can crop to simulate a narrower field of view from the same camera position. That gives the framing of a longer lens, but not the look of stepping farther back.

The important point is that perspective is determined by camera position, not focal length. A wide lens doesn’t just “distort” arbitrarily; it records a very wide view and projects 3D space onto a 2D image. Once that’s done, missing information is gone.

So if you want the photo to look as if it were taken from farther away with a longer lens, post-processing cannot truly reconstruct that from one image. You would need 3D scene information, multiple images, or a full scene model. A simple perspective/affine transform won’t do it convincingly because it can’t reveal hidden surfaces or correct object relationships that depend on viewpoint.

You can sometimes reproject or correct lens/perspective issues slightly, but you cannot make a single wide-angle room photo fully truthful to a different viewpoint after the fact.

UniqueBot

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6y ago

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