The fisheye lens effect, used judiciously, has great creative uses. Although your best bet is to use an SLR camera with a real fisheye lens, you can achieve a similar effect in Photoshop without such a lens.

Although creating a fisheye lens effect in Photoshop might seem very easy, using the built-in filters such as Spherize, the advantage of the technique I am sharing is that the original image remains fully editable and distortion-free, and any future edits do not require repeating the distortion effects.

Getting Started

Requirements: You will need Photoshop CS3 or CS4.

The first step is to open an image in Photoshop. If the layer says “Background” (in italics), double-click the layer, and then click the OK button (the layer will now be named “Layer 0″, unless you gave it another name). This gives the layer an alpha channel (i.e., transparency), which is essential for this technique to work. You won’t see the transparency yet.

Now from the menu choose Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object. This is the magic step that makes this technique possible. Again, you won’t see any change in the picture; the only apparent change is a small badge added to the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette.

Next choose Edit > Free Transform. A big “X” will appear across your photo. Immediately click the Warp icon in the control bar:

You will now see several lines crossing your photo, dividing it into nine squares. You will also see various “handles” along the perimeter of the image. You can drag these to warp the image. What you want to do is grab the corner handles, and pull them in. Pull them in until the lines on either side of the handle form a single straight line, and so that the corner point is halfway between the end points:

(If you have trouble visualizing where the midpoint should go, you can make a layer above or below this layer, and draw a big X across it with the line tool. That will give you a guide.)

Do all four corners the same way. When you are done, your image will look like this:

(My background is black because I created a layer filled with black and placed it behind. If you haven’t done that, you will see the transparency checkerboard instead. You can fill the background with whatever you like—on a separate layer!—or leave it empty. It’s up to you.)

We’re making progress, but there is still a bit more to do to complete the effect and make it look realistic.

Now you need to select the circle shape. The easiest way to do this on the Mac is to hold down the Command key and click on the layer. (Control key on Windows.)

Then choose Filter > Distort > Spherize…. Enter whatever value you thinks look good. Values of 70 to 85 seem to work well. This adds a little ballooning to the image, as you would have with a fisheye lens.

You will now have an image that looks like this:

These kinds of lens tend to go dark on the edges, so we’ll add some dark edging next.

Again, select the circle shape. Hold the Command key on a Mac / Control key on Windows, and this time click the the black and white Smart Filters mask, which is right below the layer in the Layers palette.

This will give us the correct selection, since the Spherize filter has actually changed the visible image shape.

Now inverse the selection, with Select > Inverse.

Create a new layer directly above the lens layer (Layer > New > Layer…). Fill the selected area with black, using Edit > Fill, and choosing Black as the fill color.

Without losing the selection, choose Layer > Layer Mask > Hide Selection. It will appear that the new layer with the black has disappeared.

The new layer has two thumbnails now; the layer contents, on the left; and the mask, on the right. Click the left thumbnail to highlight it.

Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a large number, like maybe 60. It will depend on your image size, which number will work the best. You should see the edges turning dark. However, at very high numbers, the effect will also become diluted. If you want to emphasize the effect, duplicate the layer. Don’t go too crazy with the darkening, though. Keep it subtle.

You should now have an image like this:

Now we are basically done.

But here is the cool part: If you double-click the thumbnail in the lens layer (Layer 0), you can edit the base image. You will see that the original image is still square. You can add layers, type, or anything you want. And when you close the original image window, and return to the lens effect window, anything you added will appear with the fisheye lens effect!

Here is an example, showing type that was added after all the steps were finished. You can see that Photoshop automatically warps the type to have the fisheye look:

If you want, you could even save this image as a template. Any new images you dragged into the original smart object would be automatically warped and shaded for you, without needing to repeat any of these steps.

The project is now complete. Enjoy!