The optics in the lens on your camera create a unique distortion of the captured image, which is more pronounced with zoom lenses. You might not even notice the effect on your images until you see the results after using software to correct it. The camera body design can introduce some distortion as well. Taking the time to apply good distortion correction algorithms to your image is well worth the effort, in my opinion. Fortunately, with the proper software, it is also an easy process. There are a number of software packages available that perform fairly well. Here I will relate my first impressions of four popular programs. I am using a Canon 60D camera with an EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens for this comparison. The image was saved by the camera in RAW mode at the highest resolution: 5184 x 3456 pixels.
Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) 3.13.10.0
DPP is provided free to Canon camera owners. DPP had the correct camera body and lens models available. Once the Lens fine tuning was selected, and distortion turned on (it is off by default), the correction was applied. The result was very good, and on a par with DxO Optics (see below). DPP does a good job and the price is right. However, the corrected image size grew to 5337 x 3558 pixels. When I reized this in Phoroshop to the original 5184 x 3456 size, there was an apparent difference from the result produced by DxO Optics.
Adobe Photoshop CC 14.1.1
Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud), approximately the equivalent of Photoshop CS6, has a filter called Lens Correction. After you select the filter, a window opens and you then select your camera model and lens. My exact camera model was not listed, but the lens was listed. I selected Canon 50D as the camera. (I'll explain the Photoshop update process in a later post, but suffice it to say it included a dreaded system restart.) The resulting image looked better than the original. Two camera models were available: the Canon 7D and the 50D. With the same lens model, selecting each of the two camera models produced slightly different results. With either setting, the result was not as pleasing as either DPP or DxO.
Adobe Lightroom 5.2
In Lightroom the proper lens model was available under Develop > Lens Corrections but only the Canon 7D body model was shown. It may be that I needed to restart the computer to let the latest update load. An interesting effect was noted: although the lens correction was apparently identical to that of Photoshop, Photoshop cropped the image slightly and resized it to its original size. Lightroom did not do this. This behavior was unexpected. I'd have to say the Lightroom result was better than the Photoshop result given this anomaly, leaving Photoshop as the least desirable optics correction software of these four software packages.
DxO Optics Pro 8.3.1
Unlike the Adobe programs, DxO Optics detected the camera and lens models from the RAW images and presented me with the option to download the appropriate plug-ins. I selected OK and they were painlessly installed. I say painlessly since I did not need to restart anything! There are ten possible corrections; all are selected by default except Color Enhancement and Contrast. But this is in First Steps...the Advanced mode includes many more options that I have yet to explore. The new plug-in models produced a much improved image, better than both the Photoshop and Lightroom results and, to my eye, slightly better than the DPP result. I highly recommend the DxO Optics software. DxO also has plug-ins for Photoshop and Lightroom.
PTlens is another software package that is popular for lens distortion correction, but I have not yet tried it. I'll post more information in the future.
Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.
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