Lens Correction and Manhattan Skyline

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing

Since I got the request to do my same lens correction test for a panorama, but with a cityscape, I asked Mark Schaffer of Knowsphotos if he had a few RAW files I could process.  He’s a far more traveled and accomplished landscape photographer.  You should check out his site, he posts images rather regularly.  The only thing is he uses a Nikon, but I won’t hold that against him.   ;-)   Just to be clear the original RAW files are his, and I processed them (including color correction) the same way I would have for any panorama.  So this is about as close to an equal comparison as the skyline pano I performed the same test on last week.

No lens correction applied before stitching.

Yes, I know I didn’t crop the image.  I just want you to see what comes out of the pano stitching.

Lens correction applied before stitching the pano

From this size you cant really see much difference.  And even putting the photos on top of each other at 100% shows that they are very close even along the edges.  Below is a small section of the pano at 100% where the images are in a difference mode so you can see the… differences.

This is using the Exclusion blend mode so you can see the differences.

As you can see there is not a lot of difference between the two images.  So one can conclude that with this lens, lens correction will not make a large difference when stitching panoramas.  I would hazard to guess that this would be true of 99% of  you panoramas, because the way the panoramas are stitched, the least distorted area of your lens is used for the bulk of the stitched image.  If you have any distortion, it’s generally along the edges of the picture, and you normally crop that out anyway.

So now you know and can spend some time at Knowsphotos to see some of Marks Landscape and Architectural photography.