Sunday 18 March 2012

Converging verticals

I'm quite happy with my old version 6.0 of Photoshop. It does all the things I need (normally sharpening and a bit of dust removal) and probably lots of stuff that I don't. I bought it second hand (with license key) on a Swiss auction site a few years ago.

One thing that It doesn't do very well (in my humble opinion), although I'm sure you'll correct me, is to correct verticals. When I shoot buildings I really have to have all the verticals to be true. This is where PTLens comes in.

This super programme acts either as a plugin for Photoshop or as a stand alone application and will (amongst other things*), let you correct verticals, horizontals and even rotate your image. The programme identifies the camera and lens used and corrects any aberrations particular to that setup. This lens / body database is continuously updated to include the latest models.

This is what the screen looks like with an image loaded before correction.


You can see that PTLens has correctly identifies the camera / lens combination. I have "barrel / pincushion" selected to correct any lens defects. I also chose a blue grid to show me how much I needed to correct.

Screenshot two shows the screen after I entered the corrections I needed.


You can see that I have used the slider for verticals and scaled the image by 117% because correcting for tilt, gave me some black edges.

I love this programme and always recommend it. You can read more about it and see more examples by visiting Tom Niemann's website here.

In case you're interested, I would normally have stood further back to get this type of image but on that Sunday, There was a tree to my back and I only had my EF 24 f2.8 lens with me.

The picture and it's location can be seen on Google Earth by visiting here.

Thanks for reading.

* the other things include barrel distortion, chromatic aberration and fish-eye "correction".

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