Originally Posted by nixcamic
So fisheye-hemi just projects the image cylindrically and I could use any many free/open source programs that do cylindrical projections to defish images with similar effect? That would be interesting.
Well, it depends on the subject, the distance of the subject from the lens, and the angle of view.
I took my 8mm fisheye to a cemetery this weekend and while I was able to de-fish most images very nicely, some close-up shots taken with an angled perspective didn't look right at all when I tried to use the fisheye-hemi plug-in to remove the distortion.
Even when I tried PTLens or CS3's lens correction tool it didn't look right.
Bottom line, you can de-fish a fisheye shot and "sometimes" it will look great ... but a fisheye lens and a fancy Photoshop plug-in is no replacement for a good non-fisheye wide angle lens.
I'm really looking forward to the new DA 15mm Limited that Pentax has on the roadmap. If it isn't a fisheye I'll probably be adding that lens to my kit.
