Unfishing a fish. Starring the Samyang 8mm fisheye

Since I got my Samyang 8mm fisheye lens, I’d used it a few times mainly to take shots like this one:

Awww but I don’t like fish mum!

It’s a fun lens to use occasionally.  I’d heard about de-fishing fisheye shots, but never actually tried it myself.

Recently I took this shot:

It’s alright, the framing of the buildings makes the circular distortion of the fisheye work I think.  However I wanted to try and see how removing the distortion would go.

To my surprise, Lightroom had a Samyang 8mm/Fujifilm profile.  So I gave it a go, here’s the default settings and result:

Well it sure did its job.  However the buildings look a bit too straight for my liking, so I decided to tone done the distortion control to these settings:

Here’s the result:

Somewhat like a UWA lens shot.  You lose a little of the outer edges, but the shot remains sharp and detailed as you can see from this 100% crop:

Even the edges are sharp enough:

So, in a pinch it makes the Samyang 8mm into an UWA lens.  In the future I intend to get a Samyang 12mm (non-fisheye) lens, so I’d like to compare how a de-fished fisheye compares to a proper wide angle lens.

Thanks for reading,