In this tutorial we are going to unwrap a Nikkor 10.5mm DX Fisheye image to produce a really wide angle image.

What we need is some free software called Panorama Tools , this is a great piece of software to do stitching and all kinds of fancy stuff to images, but for this tutorial we're going to stick to unwrapping the Fisheye image using the adjust module.

I use Panorama Tools in Photoshop CS, so first we start by loading the image we are going to unwrap into Photoshop.

Then we choose 'Filter -> Panorama Tools -> Adjust'.

To set up the input/output options we need to go into the options panel for the Adjust module, so click the 'Set' button.

Then we put in the different values that are needed to do proper calculation for input and output, since the input is a Fisheye image, we check Fisheye for the image options. The image wil be converted to a rectilinear image, so for Panorama options we check 'Rectilinear'.

We also need to set HFOV values for both image and panorama. The Nikkor 10.5mm DX has a FOV of roughly 142 degrees, so input 142 into the HFOV-field for the image. The HFOV value for Panorama will be 125, that should create really nice straight lines in our final image.

In this case I have exported the NEF from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.3.1, so for this image the width and height is set to the full resolution of the exported image, if you have a different size, say 1024 by 768, that would be the values you put into the width and height fields for your image.

To finish input and start converting the image, click the 'OK' buttons for options and adjust window.  The computer will take a few moments to do the calculations.

After a while  you should have this.

As you can see, we get some areas that are black at the top and bottom, so we need to crop those out of the picture.

And here we are, this is the final result, do some sharpening and you're done.

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- Kurt