Lens Correction and Panos?

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

After looking into what lens correction added (or didn’t add) to my portraits, I wondered if the lens correction being applied to each individual image before stitching the panorama would help.  One would think that the lens correction would straighten out the individual images and then the final panorama won’t have that bent bowtie effect.  So I decided to do a test with the following panorama.

After applying the lens correction and restitching I came out with the following panorama.

It’s kind of hard to tell, but it appears that the center horizontal of the panorama is a bit straighter.  But the sky appears to have even more bend to it.  So I decided to overlay the images to see how different they were.

There’s a pretty big difference and I think that applying the lens correction to the individual images before stitching does help the final image.  What do you think?  Is it a positive difference?

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Lens Correction for Portraits?

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

This feature was one of my most anticipated of the Lightroom 3 and Adobe CS5 before they came out. I don’t have any fisheye lenses and generally don’t have anything that looks distorted but that little perfectionist in me wanted my images to be correct. Now that I’ve used it for several months, I find I often forget to turn it on and I don’t miss not using it. Am I missing something or is the lens distortion not a big deal unless you have an extremely distorted lens? There is more correction as your focal goes down.

Here’s one image taken with a Canon 28-135mm at a 28mm focal length. Looking at them side-by-side so to speak, you can’t really see what’s been corrected.

Once I put one image in a difference blend mode, you can start to see that the distortion wasn’t anywhere near my subject. Black is areas with no correction.  The colored section is where there’s been a correction to the distortion and it’s in an area I would probably crop out anyway. So I don’t see a need for it in this case. Do you enable lens correction for your portraits?

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The Photography Tip of the Week #074

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Keep it firm

074 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

It’s time to check your camera, even though it’s working just fine.  Your lenses are clean, there is no dust on the body and your strap is secure.  But there is another thing you may need to check… the firmware.  Firmware is the software that runs inside your digital camera.  From time to time the camera manufacturer will post updated software (or firmware) for your camera.  These updates often include speed enhancements, new features and sometimes fixes to the way the images are processed.  In short there is generally no reason to not upgrade the firmware.

So take a moment to go to your camera manufacturer’s website and see if there’s a firmware update for your camera model.  If you don’t know where to go just search on “firmware update cameramodel” where the cameramodel is the model of your camera.  They will have detailed instructions on how to check what version you have so you can see if your camera needs updating or not as well as how to perform the update.  In most cases the update is as simple as putting a file on a newly formatted memory card.  You put it in your camera with a fully charged battery and it does it’s magic.  Having a fully charged battery is very important.  You don’t want the camera to lose power part way through the update cycle.  In some cases you can just connect the camera to your computer and update directly without transferring to a memory card.  It really is that simple.

One thing you may have to do after the update is to change the date and time and any other user specified information like your copyright info or special settings. So don’t update your firmware right as you are heading out the door for your next photo session.  Pick a nice afternoon when you have plenty of time.  It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to perform the update, but I find that I like to use the time afterwards to look through the menus and see what new functions and abilities are buried within.

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And How about HDRtist?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up

If you don’t know if HDR is for you and want to try your hand (or photography) at it, you have the option of of your choice of various 30 day trials for plugins and software.  But if you are like me, sometimes you get distracted and those trials run out or you may not have the time to really vest yourself into a new technology.  So a free program for HDR photography like HDRtist by Ohanaware may be what you are looking for.  It’s simple… really simple.  Drop the photos on the app and you have a single strength slider to control the look.  It appears that it’s more than just exposure blending, so you can make your HDR anywhere from bland to really punchy.  But if you want something funky, you’ll have to blend images from different scenes.

Here’s where you come in: Give HDRtist a try and tell me what you think.  I’m not affiliated with them in any way, just curious if you think a single slider bar is enough, even for freeware.

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And how about HDR Expose

Posted by Philip in Follow-up

I got a comment about another HDR application by Unified Color entitled HDR Expose.  And after only testing it on one set of images, I must say I don’t like it yet.  It took it nearly 20 minutes to  merge the 3 RAW images when both Photomatix and CS5 only took a couple of minutes on the same machine.  I know that one data point isn’t a good reason to completely denounce them.  So I’m not.  The proof is in the image.  After all if the image is that much better, then the extra processing time is worth it.  But I found the image to be noisy.  Fortunately they have their own noise reduction algorithm which seems to work rather well.

So after my one image test I can say there’s nothing really endearing me to HDR Expose yet.  But I’m going to have to test it on a lot more images.  It could be my computer got hit by a stray cosmic ray and caused it to process really slow.  And my ignorance of their interface is also a problem.  I’m going to give it a fair shake over the month and see if it performs better than I originally tested.  Below is the same image processed through HDR Expose.

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