dave_bass5 wrote:
Has anyone tried the Lens correction tool in PSCS2?
I find its very good at correcting this sort of image
I *knew* there was something new in CS2 for this - I was just too tired to really think about it last night.
But here it is, the CS2 Lens Correction version:
This got me to realize a couple other points about this whole thing.
Using PS's Transform... Perspective was the easiest, but in my opinion the least exact and very subjective. It's difficult to get the final image perfectly correct, and you really are "guessing" a bit. That is, you make the adjustment until it looks good. Subjective and not at all scientific. I also don't think it does a very good job across the entire image. It's easy to get the building on the left to look good, but I don't think the right-most building looks equally as good.
CS2's Lens Correction was a bit more difficult (time-consuming) but it's not like it took much time. It's also somewhat subjective, but the grid makes things much easier and much more exact. Being able to correct the barrel distortion was a huge plus in my opinion, and got rid of the slight bulging of the building on the left. (It also can correct vignetting and chromatic aberration, so that's two more big plusses.) Though the differences are slight between the two PS images there's no doubt in my mind that the Lens Correction filter is better, and worth the extra minute to use. But I'm still not happy with the entire image, and I don't like the right-most building very much.
The PTGui version is less subjective and much more scientific. The process involves mathematical data to correct the distortion caused by the angle of the lens. Furthermore I was able to place control points on all the buildings which allows me to be exact about which lines in the image should be perfectly vertical. So I was able to get the right-most building looking as straight as the left-most building. PTGui also corrects the "horizon warping" caused by the wide angle lens. This is not a good example image for this since the horizon line is uneven, so it's not very noticable. But I also ran this image through PTLens (which uses the same mathematical correction formulas as PTGui) and the correction would be quite noticable on an image with a straight horizon line.
However, PTGui was by far the most difficult to use and far more time-consuming. I know PTGui fairly well so it's easy for me, but I don't recommend learning it just to correct wide-angle distortions unless you a perfectionist. Especially if you have CS2.
