Original compared with ACR and Photo Ninja

[John Geerts]

Thank you all for the impressive 'rework' and remarks.  Very useful.

Frank:  Yes, setting all to zero looks like the best approach in PN.

Pluton, Simsurace:  Yes you are right about the strange distortion in the 'ACR' - file.    Must have been the flu, but I noticed now the Lens-correction was not on (or the wrong lens), in ACR.    To be sure the orignal file was checked and rechecked but that is the one without any corrections. The basic Raw. 

Simsurace:  Impressive work, I didnt hear before of the PTGui with the Panorama Tools. Looks like a fast tool.

Andrea: I like your nice summerly version.  One of the Photo's of the street will be used for an article highlighting a political discussion about the reconstruction of the road  (Too less green)

Pluton, Simsurace:  Indeed,  what a strange 'distortions'.  But that's the normal behaviour of the lens, not?

Airy:  There are online lens-profiles for older Nikkor lenses.  http://pindelski.org/Photography/technical/download-lens-profiles/   It's just a matter of downloading and installing in the Camera Raw directory in 'Lens profiles'.  It will be available in ACR that way.


It looks like Photo Ninja is not capable of giving the needed distortion-correction. I couldn't find the correct way. (it may be there perhaps). A better file based on PN was not possible.

With the correct use of the Lens Profile in ACR  and some 'Skewing' in CC a more or less acceptable file could be made, I think. However, Simurace's version is better.

[simsurace]

Pluton, Simsurace:  Yes you are right about the strange distortion in the 'ACR' - file.    Must have been the flu, but I noticed now the Lens-correction was not on (or the wrong lens), in ACR.    To be sure the orignal file was checked and rechecked but that is the one without any corrections. The basic Raw. 

Simsurace:  Impressive work, I didnt hear before of the PTGui with the Panorama Tools. Looks like a fast tool.

Pluton, Simsurace:  Indeed,  what a strange 'distortions'.  But that's the normal behaviour of the lens, not?

I jumped in because even the corrected shots had curved building walls, which indicate that the correction does not work optimally. With lenses which have simple (low-order) distortion, you can usually get rid of all of it with ACR profiles. I fail to understand why almost all tools do much worse with the wavy or moustache distortions; the math needed to correct them is only marginally more complex than what they already implement.

PTGui is nice, its main focus is making panos. For lens correction, it's not fast at all; I easily spent half an hour on your shot. Maybe it gets faster with more routine. What I would love is a specialized plugin or software specialized for correcting all kinds of distortions that allows you to define lines, parallels or rectangles and it performs the optimization. One could probably use the panorama tools engine and throw together such an app.

I haven't used the lens, but yes I think this distortion is quite normal for the lens in question. It is an older design, and a lot of progress has been made in recent years in reducing distortions in wide-angle lenses. The 16-35 has pretty strong distortion on the wide end, but they are simple barrel type. Also witness the difference between the old 20/2.8 and the new 20/1.8; the former had quite obnoxious moustache distortion, whereas the latter has weak and easily correctable barrel type despite being both faster and sharper than its predecessor.

[Erik Lund]

This is a typical PJ lens, not recommended for architecture 14-24mm AFS 2.8 is much better in the regard especially at around 17mm it only has half of the distortion
Or go with 24mm 1.4 AFS and stitch two or more images together in PTGui, here three, and you get that close up feeling from around 14-17mm without distortion, since you can shoot with the camera level and crop away what you don't need, here a lot of the fore ground is removed...

[John Geerts]

Sorry for the late reaction, Erik.  But that is a great solution you mention, didn't realize that it's possible. Thanks.