Correct Lens Distortion in GIMP with GimpLensfun

While GIMP offers a wide range of tools for working with photos, it lacks one feature that is essential for serious photographers: the ability to automatically fix lens distortion. Fortunately, the GimpLensfun plugin fills the void quite nicely. As the name suggests, the plugin uses the excellent LensFun library as its back end. One way to install the plugin is to compile it from source. Start with installing the required packages. On Ubuntu, this can be done using the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgimp2.0-dev libexiv2-dev liblensfun-dev git

Grab then the latest source code from the project's GitHub repository:

git clone git://github.com/seebk/GIMP-Lensfun.git

Switch to the GIMP-Lensfun directory and run the make command to compile the plugin:

cd GIMP-Lensfun
make

Move then the compiled gimp-lensfun plugin to the ~/.gimp-2.x/plug-ins/ directory, and you are done. If you don't feel like getting your hands dirty compiling the plugin, you can grab the latest tarball from the project's website. The archive contains compiled versions of the plugin stored in the /bin/linux directory.


Once the plugin has been installed it can be accessed via the Filters | Enhance | GimpLensfun menu. The plugin automatically reads the lens and camera model along with the corresponding parameters from the photo's EXIF data, so all you need to do is to hit OK to apply lens correction.