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.

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

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.

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.

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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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