Taming the GoPro’s a snap, for Photoshop CS6

GoPro's Hero-series cameras have proven very popular with fans of the great outdoors, and for good reason. They're simple to operate, relatively compact and light, and pretty rugged. GoPros have shot video of everything from wingflying to wakeboarding, and they've even been up to the stratosphere. Wherever they go, though, it's usually pretty easy to recognize the footage as being shot by a GoPro. That's thanks in part to the fisheye look typical of GoPro video, something not many videographers take the time to correct for in post processing. While the extreme wide angle makes sense given that you're not carefully aiming the camera exactly at your subject, it can unfortunately detract significantly from the final video's appeal, as horizons bow up and down every time the camera moves.

With the Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta out, that may change though. A video from Adobe France's Stéphane Baril and Jimmy Thirion at GoPro's French distributor, Xtreme Video, shows how easy PS CS6 makes it to defish video from the GoPro without plugins or complicated calibration. In a matter of a couple of minutes, Stéphane sets up a correction from scratch, simply by using the Adaptive Wide Angle filter. The source video needs some straight lines to key off as you're configuring the correction, but once you're done this can then be reused on other videos shot with the same camera and focal length, without the need to set everything up all over again.

It's a pretty cool trick, and one we're sure will make defished GoPro video a much more common sight! Courtesy of Stéphane and Vimeo, here's the full story on how to defish GoPro footage yourself, with the PS CS6 beta:

(Via John Nack on Adobe)