E:D Undistortified

by CMDR inshadowz

The game Elite:Dangerous makes for particularly amazing screenshots, and I take a large number of such myself. The only problem is, the images are often heavily distorted, just like wide angle photographs tend to be, and if you’re anything like me then you get somewhat annoyed by this. Fortunately there are ways to fix the problem. For this demonstration I used Adobe Photoshop, but I’m sure there are other image editors out there that can do the same.

Note: In order to take extreme high resolution screenshots you must play in either Solo mode, or in a private group. It is not available in Open. Press Alt-F10 to save a supersized image of your scene. The more pixels you have to work with the better, even if you scale it down afterwards, although much can be done with regular 1920×1080 original too.

First: Here’s an original 8K screenshot at widest angle, complete with extreme distortion, making the planets egg shaped, and everything is stretched into freaky proportions and angles.

Second: I’ve used Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide Angle filter to compensate for the distortion. The settings for this particular image are: Correction = Perspective, Scale = 100%, Focal Length = 10.00 mm, Crop Factor = 1.00

These values, particularly Focal Length, will have to be adapted to match the amount of wide angle in each screenshot. For example, fully zoomed-in pictures will require far less adjustment, if any.

Third and last: For the final, completed image I’ve simply cropped away the excess empty space, making for a nicely rectangular picture with regular, spherical planets. For this particular one, I changed the Scale factor to 131%.