Jim,
How do you correct the barrel effect? Oh, but you are not using Photoshop... anyway, go ahead, the principles and the tools must be more or less the same in both programs. Thanks.
Lisa,
An even better Photoshop tool than Perspective is Sqew.
Perspective moves two corners of a selection at the same time. Some times you need to bring one corner into square more than the other and here Sqew comes in handy. Just make a selection of what you want to square up, give yourself a couple of guiding lines as to form a 90 degree angle against which to modify your selected area of the picture and proceed with Edit>Transform>Sqew. Grab one corner and pull it any needed direction. When you are done with the first corner, you go to the next. This way you make perfect square corners in Photoshop.
But if the picture was taken from little distance, the sphericity of the lens would "barrel" distort that picture. The degree of that barrel distortion is not depending on how good or bad a camera is but rather on how curved its lens is. Some lenses will distort more than others. Fish eye lenses are the ones that distort the most, but they also give you the widest viewing angle when taking pictures outdoors. You may not be aware of distortions in that case because trees and mountains are not made of straight lines and the small barrel effect passes unnoticed by the eye. Wide angle lenses are rated smaller than 50 mm (normal). As lenses get a narrower view (tele-photo lenses) their "number" (focal length) is getting larger. HB's camera must have lenses of higher than 50mm focal length and this is why barrel distortion is smaller in his camera, but not completely absent. As a minus, HB's camera gets narrower views (as if looking through a tube) and in order to get the whole picture he needs to step further back from where another camera may take the same picture.
Why do you think professional photographers need so many lenses? A wide angle lens that's good for taking outdoor shots will visibly distort faces (big nose) in portraits. With some lenses you can take close ups but not with others etc. Single lens cameras (those that can't take different lenses) are commercial cameras (sort of LaMarche, LJ, Roma cameras). They may be relatively expensive for non-connaisseurs, yet they are commercial cameras and their use is limited to "album memories". Pictures taken with commercial cameras will only be "perfect" for amateurs, for those who can't say the difference and all they are after is pilling up memories. When one needs to take photos for a catalog or for the purposes of making posters, magazines etc, then even the amateur photographer (like we all are) starts seeing the limits of any commercial camera. Those gorgeous pictures in Play Boy Magazine or Victoria's Secrets glamorous illustrations are not taken with our type of cameras. No way! The best photographer can't produce such pictures with any of our commercial cameras. In the world of cameras any 35 mm film unit is the equivalent of a very low resolution digital camera, and today's highest rezolution digital camera is only as good as a 35 mm film camera. If you want large pictures with fine details in there you need as big resolution as you can get (large format film). Or larger film format cameras like very high resolution digital cameras are for professional photographers only. They can afford to pay for a good camera as much as for a good car for they get paid a fortune for a professionally taken picture.
