Friday, July 20, 2018

Perspective correction

Shooting from a boat is never easy, tripods are ruled out pretty much and faster shutter speeds are needed to prevent blurred images. Inevitably you end up with tilted horizons, add that to perspective issues and you have a recipe for bad images.

5D Mk IV, EF 24-70 f/2.8 L II, f/10, 41mm, 1/250 sec
before correction
LR-9597 copy
Same image as above after correction

When shooting tall vertical objects, converging vertical lines can be a problem, as you can see in the top image, the vertical lines converge towards the upper center of the image. I used Lightroom's Transform module to correct this image. When using the Transform module you have to be careful not to over correct, if you do a lot of correction, resolution will be lost. I tend to not use auto correct. For this I used vertical and a small amount of horizontal. I lost some resolution and sharpness, however, the sharpness was brought back with Photo shop, using a mask on just the man made objects and applying a smart sharpen filter.

Its a pretty amazing tool and I will use it for all converging vertical and horizontal lines. This is also an argument for higher resolution sensors, with more resolution, you are able to do more correction, assuming you left enough space around the image that may be removed by correction.

Ross