Images In Light: Perspective correction

Showing posts with label Perspective correction. Show all posts

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

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

Images In Light

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Perspective Correction

Larger Image

Image: 5D Mk III, EF 24-70 f/2.8L II, 24mm, f/11 at 1/60 sec.

Perspective correction is something we come up against whenever architectural elements are the subject matter of a photograph. This image of the lighthouse in Mukilteo is a good example. Looking at this image subjectively some will say the image should be fully corrected and some will say it would look un-natural that way. I believe a certain amount of distortion is acceptable and appears more natural.

Other issues with correction are reduced resolution due to crop and sharpness loss from the correction itself, for these reasons I always try to minimize distortion correction, the original size of the image was 5760 x 3840 and the fully corrected image is 5399 x 3712, not a huge change. One last thing to keep in mind is your field of view, the fully corrected image lost a lot of foreground detail (flowers, pathway).