Another wonderful side to digital photography is the ability to correct lens distortion.  All lenses, even expensive glass like Canon “L” series lenses, have distortion.  Wide angle lenses will create barrel distortion, and telephoto lenses cread a pincushion distortion effect.

There are products on the market now such as DxO Optics Pro and PTLens that can correct these artifacts, giving straight, true lines.  It really is quite incredible, and I wanted to share with you an example of what I am talking about.

Here is an old photo I took an age ago of the building on the corner of Murray and Collins Street in Hobart.  It was taken on an 11mm lens, very wide, causing barrel distortion, and then there is perspective distortion caused by the camera looking up at the building, and I was also not standing parallel to the building either, so its on quite a few angles, and somewhat of a mess.

Now, I can run this image through my lens correction software (this was done before the colour processing was done on the image by the way) and ta-da here is the result!

Obviously because things get moved around a bit, you end out losing some areas of the image, and other parts will get pulled in.  What you see above is what was left of the building after it was all straightened up… the top of the building is gone as is the sky, and there is a lot of black around the bottom of the image where it was squeezed in that requires further cropping, so perspective correction is NOT a REPLACEMENT for taking a photo properly in the first place, but, it can save an image that might otherwise be sent straight to the trash can. I chose this image as well as it required fairly extreme correction, and therefore is a good example of what can be done.

It is rather incredible really.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts with a comment.

One thing I intend to do more of with my blog, is to discuss various items of photography hardware, as well as the software used in post-processing of images.  Now post-processing is a bit of a touchy subject for some, but don’t for a moment think that it is something new, and only been around since the digital era.  Darkroom wizards have been mixing chemicals, dodging and burning exposures to correct and enhance their images for ever.  Even the greats like Ansel Adams did it.  The simple fact is that most images will require some form of tweakage to look “right” or to look as it did to the naked eye.  You have to remember that the camera sees things differently to our eye, and digital cameras especially have a much narrower dynamic range (even compared to good old 35mm film).

Another factor to consider is that when shooting film, you have the option of shooting with different film stock to create different effects and colors.  Shooting slide film, compared to negative, will give a different effect, some films are subdued in colour, others vibrant, with saturated colours and deep contrast.  Different black and white films respond to different colours in their own unique ways, and of course the high ISO films have that lovely grain. (more…)