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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