.FLYINGHEAD EXPLORING PHOTOSHOP
.TITLE Photoshop CS5’s great new lens correction feature
.AUTHOR Scott Koegler
.SUMMARY Our eyes can see a much higher range of highlights and shadows than photos can capture and display.
.TIP
Photoshop CS5 is chock-full of great new features. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring five of our favorites. This week, we wrap up our series with Photoshop CS5’s great new lens correction features:
.H1 Great feature #5: lens correction
Another of the add-on applications that’s been incorporated into Photoshop is the automated lens correction. A manual version of this function has been available in previous versions of Photoshop, but a couple things have been vastly improved in CS5.
For one, it’s now possible to create your own conversion profile. Adobe’s lens correction setup lets you create an adjustment profile that will automatically be applied to your images based on the EXIF data read from your image files.
The thing about lens correction is that most of us believe that if we’ve paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a name brand lens, the corrections should have been taken care of in the lens. But in truth, nearly every lens has some aberrations either in color, vignetting, or linear distortion.
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CS5 includes a range of predefined lens profiles that are likely to surprise you when you apply them. When I first applied lens correction to a photo I was already happy with, I could tell the angles of the building were straighter, even though I though they were visually acceptable before the correction was applied.
Adobe’s Lens Profile Creator, a free utility available from [[labs.adobe.com|Adobe Labs]], lets you take a few shots of their supplied grids, then processes the images into a profile you can use for your specific combinations of body/lenses.
I used the sample image sent by Adobe for my tests because it is an extreme example of correction. The shot was taken with an ultra wide lens (16mm) and shows the near fisheye distortion of curved lines almost everywhere, as you can see in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A This is a seriously distorted image.
Simply selecting the Lens Correction item from the Filters menu opened the image in the filter panel and automatically corrected the linear distortion, as you can see in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B That’s better!
I also checked the Chromatic Aberration and Vignette correction boxes for good measure, but I wasn’t able to see a visible difference in this image, though many lenses are certain to benefit from these settings.
.H1 Other improvements
Photoshop Extended CS5 includes a few other refinements that may be of interest to some of us. I didn’t cover them here in an effort to concentrate on what I believe to be the most useful features for the photographer. To be sure, there are plenty of enhancements and new features to keep us busy for the next 18 months or so, till CS6 appears (Adobe has a history of releasing upgrades every 18 to 20 months).
My overall opinion is that if you’re serious about manipulating your photos, and have spent any amount of time doing what some of these improvements can now help with, upgrading to Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5 should be on the top of your list.
If nothing else, you’ll have fun putting all these features to work, and you’re likely to produce some great images as a result.
.BIO Scott Koegler explores digital products and writes about them from his home in the foothills of North Carolina, and from his camper (as long as he has an internet connection. He has acted as CIO, editor, publisher, photographer, and wine taster, and enjoyed each role.
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