Well as you all saw in yesturday’s post I compared an HDR that was taken in the spring of 2009 and processed with Photomatix Pro and Lightroom 2 with an image that was processed with Photoshop CS5′s HDR Pro and Lightroom 3 beta 2.
Today I took that same image and ran it through the new Lens Correction filter inside of Photoshop CS5. A couple of points first. This tool will be in three places, in the filter menu of Photoshop CS5, in Camera Raw 6, and it will be included in the final shipping version of Lightroom 3. Also this does not have to be done with a RAW photo, it can be done with a jpeg. The key is that it is reading the meta data of the image. I tested the photo with RAW, DNG, JPG and PSD all worked.
Now what it does is it looks in the photos meta data for the make and model of the camera body and lens used to take the picture, and Adobe has applied some complex voodoo magic to correct barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting characteristics of different lens/body combos. This is huge, as I have found on my initial testing, it does a bang up job. I had one version of the Harbor Hotel photo that the metadata was stripped out of it, and you were still able to manually tell the filter what lens and camera combo were used and then blammo corrected.
An interesting note. This photo was with a Canon 5D mark II and a Canon EF 15mm Fisheye. The filter gave me two options. It wasnt sure if it was the Canon 5D mark II or the Canon 1Ds mark III. Same sensor different cameras. I checked both out and it does give a slightly different result. The other thing to note is that if you look carefully again at the upper left, there are no clouds. It is important to remember it is moving pixels around, and stretching zooming and filling the frame. You are going to loose some data on the edge of the frame. But if you are in a bind, cant get a wide enough shot with a normal lens and you have a fisheye in your bag, you can correct for it after the fact.
Before you even ask, NO, I am not going to go back and correct all my fisheye shots, I bought a fisheye lens for the effect no the wide angle, but if I am in a pinch and I need to shoot something really wide, you betcha I will slap on the fish and correct it in post.
After Correction
Before Correction
A note to point out. Not every possible lens and camera combination are here, but if you shoot with Canon or Nikon Cameras and Lenses its a good bet they are here. Fear not though this will be a growing list of choices and you have the ability to help fill in the voids with your weird lens combos, send the data to Adobe and add to the growing database
Also the Lens Correction filter in Photoshop CS5 now lives in the main filter drop down its no longer buried in the distort section. This is something that in CS4 I would have never done manually, I had tried a few times and I just never got it good enough.
