Not Fisheye, but the good old 17-40 @17mm

No its not about putting fish back in after catching them, I read on a forum a discussion about normalizing or correcting the fisheye look from photos taken with a Fisheye. I have a 15mm Canon Fisheye and though I appreciate the effect and try to use it sensibly, sometimes I have thought “Hey thats a good photo, shame about the Fisheye look”.

After doing some research on the good old Internet I found several ways of Defishing a photo.
The easiest way is DXO Optics, its a program that has presets for cameras and lenses and “corrects” skewed lines and spherical abnormalities. It does alot of other things that I am not interested in as I use Aperture for my RAW processing. But this lens fixing feature is quite cool and with the Batch process tools of DXO Optics very handy for bulk “corrections”

I have also experimented with Defishing in Photoshop, using the Transform/Warp, Transform/Skew and Distort/Lens correction. This is more labour intensive but I find that it preserves more of the character of the Fisheye lens. Also this method gives more control but at the same time it is a slower process and not something I´d do for a large shoot.

Here are some examples, the same photo – original, Photoshopped and DXO´ed

I like the Photoshopped version the best, the DXO one looses the wideangle feel that I like. Also it is somehow very long.
I liked the fisheye effect on the sky and on the water in the foreground and in DXO Optics the photo looses that effect a little.
Here are 100% crops from each photo first the DXO´ed then the original and then the photoshopped version.

Do not Defish People, this is what happens

If the person is more in the center it works better.

I actually like this version defished by DXO Optics.

My excuses to Byron for distorting his face