Distortion Help Needed

I took this photo in St. Augustine Fl with my 24-105 at 24mm. The distortion on the light pole on the left is making me insane. I've tried to get rid of it using different lens correction features in CS5 and have also tried transform and warp but all to no avail. Any ideas how I can straighten it? Also, any idea why I would get so much distortion on just one side of the image? Thanks in advance.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …regandmellina/5​451525743/

Are you sure it's distortion and not a real-life bend to the lamp post? I can't see much distortion to the window behind it

Edit: Looking closer, it does look like that small tower in the back is also slightly tilting....

Puppet warp or liquify would be good places to start of the normal warp tool has failed you.

Even with the key-stoning corrected the lamp-post looks droopy. It it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a droopy lamp-post.

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Hm, the problem I see it that neither light pole is actually aligned with the lines of the building, so it's not just a lens correction issue. Lens correction would "stretch" the top part of the image to align those vertical lines, but they still would not ake the poles match. It would help the poles to be more "vertically correct", though.

Well, in the time between looking at the image and posting, I can see that Elie has both discussed as well as nicely illustrated the problem!

Thanks all. When I did a lens correction to make the poles more "vertically correct", the cross at the top of the church came too close to the top edge of the photo. I think I'll go back and reshoot the image and while I'm at it, I'll check the vertical alignment of that damn post!

gregr2 wrote in post #11857320
I think I'll go back and reshoot the image and while I'm at it, I'll check the vertical alignment of that damn post!

Good idea. Also: Make sure your absolutely straight in front of the church, so both lamp poles are in the same position relative to the windows of the church. Now you were a bit too far to the left


In the original shot, there's a bit of keystoning, pillow distortion and a slightly bent lamp post.

Yea for puppet warp! I made a pen tool selection of the lamp post and selected the bent lamp post onto a new layer. On the original, I did a lens correction to remedy the barrel and vertical perspective distortion. This correction, with the bent lamp post, establishes how the new, straightened lamp post should be placed in the final comp. Then I used the puppet warp and regular warp tool to try to match the lens-corrected distortion of the mate lamp post. I did a content-aware fill on the left window and wall to "fill in" the church content behind the original, bent lamp post, refining the content-aware fill with manual cloning from the opposite side of the church.

Kirk

EDIT: looks like the whole image in my edit is listing slightly to the left - that needs to be straightened.

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kirkt wrote in post #11862066
Yea for puppet warp! I made a pen tool selection of the lamp post and selected the bent lamp post onto a new layer. On the original, I did a lens correction to remedy the barrel and vertical perspective distortion. This correction, with the bent lamp post, establishes how the new, straightened lamp post should be placed in the final comp. Then I used the puppet warp and regular warp tool to try to match the lens-corrected distortion of the mate lamp post. I did a content-aware fill on the left window and wall to "fill in" the church content behind the original, bent lamp post, refining the content-aware fill with manual cloning from the opposite side of the church.

Kirk

EDIT: looks like the whole image in my edit is listing slightly to the left - that needs to be straightened.

Nice edit.