Getting soft corners with a wide-angle dome is a pretty common issue, especially for certain combinations of lenses that are not quite optimized for one another.
A few good things to try are:
- Zoom through the dome further if you’re using a zoom lens behind a dome. The most common scenario where this becomes a problem is with compact cameras with 24mm field of views on the wide angle side. Some wide angle domes are designed to be used with 28mm lenses – so at 24mm, the lens is essentially “too wide” for the dome. The solution here is to zoom in a few millimeters until better results are achieved.
- Close down your aperture. By increasing your F stop, from, say, f2.8 to f11, you’ll improve sharpness in the corners significantly. This, of course, comes at the trade off of worse light-gathering potential – so it’s best to do this in shallow water or if you have external lighting.
- In some cases, vignetting (black shrouding around the peripheral of the image) may occur with some combinations of lenses and domes. If neither of the above work, another pretty good method is to apply de-vignette corrections in post processing programs like Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom has a pretty incredible ability to remove vignette, with the vignette slider – if all else fails, give this a try!
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