CS5 camera raw lens correction profiles

[Anorakus]

Has anyone had a play with this?

Adobe Camera Raw v6 in Photoshop CS5 lets you apply distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting correction using built-in profiles tailored to the lens used, which ACR picks up from the EXIF data.

I've had a play with this and it seems to work great - at least on my 24-70mm f/2.8 L - especially colour fringe removal.. but I'm not sure about routinely using distortion correction, which appears to correct barrel and pincushion effects. I've always thought that distortion is part of the "look" you get with a particular lens..

Any thoughts?

A.

 

[Chappers]

Sometimes , especially with wide angle lens there is some "distortion " of the image. Straight lines are not straight. Now whilst this may for some shots will give an interesting look, on other occasions it's doesn't help the image. This can be especially true with ultrawide and fisheye lenses.

Using the distortion correction can help get a more "normal" shot when using these ultar wide lenses. It all depends on what is wanted by you or the client. I've had to use a fish eye on several occasions to "get every thing in" then had to use software to get rid of the extreme distortion. The lens correction in ACR/ LR3 does a good job, and requires a lot less PP work than other software on the market. ( excluding DXO)

 

[Musicman]

I've been doing it routinely for years using PTLens (I found DXO too slow and cumbersome).

I do a fair bit of photography of buildings (although I'm not an architectural photographer as such) and the ability to make straight lines straight is invaluable. I know that it'll barely be worth it with my 70-200 at around 90-100mm, as it's almost bang on (zero distortion) but at the further extremes of the zoom, it makes a significant difference. With most of my other lenses, it'll often be of enough benefit for some of my compositions to make it worthwhile.

I know that these three shots, for example, made a lot less sense when the distortions induced by the lens were present.

Applying distortion (and vignette) corrections is also of great benefit when you're stitching together shots to create a panorama, which is the main reason PTLens exists in the first place.

edit: If your photography is mainly of people or other subjects, it may make relatively little difference to you.

The only thing that's holding me back from upgrading to LR3 is that I'll have to upgrade one of my two computers (the one that contains my archive and is least used for day-to-day processing, somewhat annoyingly) to be able to use it. Being able to do such corrections on the fly with the RAW file rather than having to export to PS is very attractive.