Beginner How important is Lens correction in PP

SsSsSsSsSnake

SsSsSsSsSnake

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Im asking as I like using Aperture but it has limited lens correction compared to LR,
Do the extra options in LR make a lot of difference,
As far as i understand they are more to do with vignetting CA and BD?
would welcome any advice on this.
thankyou
 
How useful it will be will depend on the lens. Some lens correction is very small, whilst with some others, it can be quite dramatic.

Lens are not perfect, so anything that can help with their deficiencies, will be very useful.
 
Thanks Johny,is the correction less to do with colour sharpness etc and more towards distortions etc?
Might add lens used up to now will be 50mm 1.8 .18-55mm VRii and the sigma 105mm macro, with possibly the return of the 35mm 1.8 and maybe the 85mm 1.8
thanks again
 
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cheers
Johnny,exactly what I needed.had another idea also,use the Nikon software to correct lens then move to aperture for the rest.also having a look at RAW therapy
thanks
 
SsSsSsSsSnake said:
Im asking as I like using Aperture but it has limited lens correction compared to LR,
Do the extra options in LR make a lot of difference,
As far as i understand they are more to do with vignetting CA and BD?
would welcome any advice on this.
thankyou
Click to expand...

If you are still using Aperture, you are using a software that has reached the end of its line now that Apple have stopped developing it, so new lens profiles will not be added. So getting to know some new software; Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One etc etc will be the way forward.

And to answer your question, yes, lens corrections in my view, usually yield improvements, although the higher up the scale/price the less noticeable it will be as the lenses are not built down to a price as much, which creates inevitably creates compromises on some of the cheaper lenses.
 
SsSsSsSsSnake said:
cheers
Johnny,exactly what I needed.had another idea also,use the Nikon software to correct lens then move to aperture for the rest.also having a look at RAW therapy
thanks
Click to expand...
So you are planning to swap and change through three different sets of software to get an image?

Seems like hard work to me.

Nikon software went off the boil after NX2 so that would be something else I would cross off my list.
 
Hi Ian, not three was going to look at Raw therapy see what it is like.
I realise if new lenses come out that Aperture won't support them but as of now as I see it,there are enough for what i need.
I have tried LR and I'm not too keen on it and Capture one seems good but still prefer Aperture.will have a think though.thanks for your suggestions
 
For completeness sake.. my understanding is that the micro 4/3 system applies vignetting and distortion lens correction in camera; the 'raw' data is modified. I think each individual lens is calibrated and the information stored in the lens, but I wait to be corrected.
 
the lens corrections in light room are full automatic for very many cameras and lenses.
The Ca,fringing, vignetting and distortions that remain on the Fuji X cameras are absolutely minimal after the latest round of improvements in Lightroom.
There is absolutely no need to make further corrections manually. This is as true for the raw files as it is with Jpegs. It is not true however for inherited lenses.
 
I'm still getting to grips with Lightroom, RAW files and the rest of all things digital after a long absence from "creative" photography.

In trying to understand the same issues as you - what exactly do the lens profiles and corrections within Lightroom do, and should I enable them, I stumbled accross this article on a website called Lenstip. It is for a 16mm Pancake lens for a Samsung NX mirrorless APS-C casmera. (Loads of other lenses are tested too - so you may find your own lenses there).

http://www.lenstip.com/332.6-Lens_review-Samsung_NX_16_mm_f_2.4_Distortion.html

Look at the 2 images at the bottom of the page for lens distortion. As previously mentioned by Juggler, a lot of cameras appear to perform in-camera lens correction to a very succesfull degree. In the Samsung NX range it is only corrected in the in-camera conversion to JPEG. The RAW file is uncorrected. You can therefore compare the two images. Quite startling.

It's made me realise that if I intend to continue shooting RAW in order to have more scope to adjust in post production then enabling lens correction in Lightroom is vital especially for wide angle lenses like this. (The flipside of course is that perhaps shooting in JPEG isn't so terrible after all as the camera is doing a lot of useful correction and processing unseen, as well as compressing the image size).
 
I know this may be regarded as a superfluous statement if you're already knowledgeable on Lightroom but remember to tick the box to receive the lens correction!
You can set up an import rule so the box is always ticked also.

Untitled.jpg
 
Hi Rich,
Yes. It was whilst setting up import rules within Lightroom and trying to decide whether or not enable Lens correction or not using the lens profile during the import process that I found the lenstip website that I linked to above.

Although I haven't actually tested this I presume that even when enabled Lightroom will only apply Lens correction to RAW files on the basis that in-camera processed Jpegs have already been corrected. When I get chance I may have a play to satisfy my own curiosity.
 
Correcting lens aberrations in software is very important, and becoming more so as manufacturers rely on it to do things that are better done in post-processing rather than optically. This gives lens designers more freedom to improve performance in other areas, eg sharper, larger apertures, longer zoom range, smaller/lighter/cheaper. Even Leica does it, with some corrections added to the Raw files too and mandatory with most software, including Lightroom http://www.dpreview.com/previews/leica-t-typ701/7

In Lightroom, distortion and vignetting relies on custom profiles for correction, though CA (latitudinal red/green) correction does not - it just looks for coloured fringes and removes them. It does a pretty good job automatically and can be even better if you use the fringe dropper to identify particularly colours. It sorts out purple fringing (longitudinal CA) well this way, that is otherwise quite hard to remove. A point to note is that software doesn't actually 'correct' CA, it neutralises it - basically changing the colour to blend with adjacent areas. In other words, cleaning up CA doesn't increase sharpness.
 
HoppyUK said:
A point to note is that software doesn't actually 'correct' CA, it neutralises it - basically changing the colour to blend with adjacent areas. In other words, cleaning up CA doesn't increase sharpness.
Click to expand...

That is true for longitudinal CA, but for lateral CA, the RGB channels are individually scaled and distorted by the software algorithms, so that the mismatches between them are minimised.

The net effect is that it does increase sharpness of the combined full-colour image (allowing for a very small loss of resolution in the remapped channels).

This 2005 paper describes a method for calculating the geometric displacement maps for the R and B channels with reference to the G channel: http://cipa.icomos.org/fileadmin/template/doc/TURIN/403.pdf
 
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This was one of the big motivators for me jumping from Aperture to LR. The default lens correction is very useful (for CA and distortion and whatever other whichcraft it does) but I also find it most useful for correcting perspective distortion using the manual controls so that I can get buildings that should be vertical to actually be vertical without jumping into PS.
 
Musicman said:
That is true for longitudinal CA, but for lateral CA, the RGB channels are individually scaled and distorted by the software algorithms, so that the mismatches between them are minimised.

The net effect is that it does increase sharpness of the combined full-colour image (allowing for a very small loss of resolution in the remapped channels).

This 2005 paper describes a method for calculating the geometric displacement maps for the R and B channels with reference to the G channel: http://cipa.icomos.org/fileadmin/template/doc/TURIN/403.pdf
Click to expand...

Thanks for this Rob. I can only really speak for Lightroom and I have a hazy recollection that Adobe changed from custom CA profiles to the present edge-detection method some years ago (Lightroom 3?). Not sure about that, but presently in Lightroom, while distortion and vignetting rely on custom profiles (it picks up the lens ID from EXIF, or you can select from the pull-down menu), CA does not. The lens ID is not specified and it also works just as well in auto-correct mode with lenses for which it doesn't have any profile data.

However, while looking into this I discovered that CA correction does in fact increase sharpness (as measured with Imatest MTF). In my previous checks on this, the difference was zero or insignificant. On average, MTF goes up by maybe 2-3%, or in areas of max CA by 4-5% or so. This is still a very small amount in visual terms, but it is there. More to the point, the subjective improvement in sharpness by the removal of the intrusive and distracting coloured fringes is very noticeable.
 
HoppyUK said:
Thanks for this Rob. I can only really speak for Lightroom and I have a hazy recollection that Adobe changed from custom CA profiles to the present edge-detection method some years ago (Lightroom 3?).
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Sounds about right. I think it was version 4 when they brought in the single checkbox Lateral CA correction which analyses the image and does it all automatically. I remember you had to manually dial in the CA adjustments on sliders before that.

I think there was a sort of half-way-house where you used an eyedropper for a short while between the two.
 
With Fuji X cameras in LIghtroom, all the corrections are made absolutely automatically ( it is built into part of the raw processor function, so it works the same in photoshop)... there is no way to turn them on or off. You can not even tell if anything has happened.... except for the absence of aberrations.
 
And to answer your question, yes, lens corrections in my view, usually yield improvements, although the higher up the scale/price the less noticeable it will be as the lenses are not built down to a price as much, which creates inevitably creates compromises on some of the cheaper lenses.[/QUOTE]

I don't know, I use lightroom and my walk around lens is a 24-70II seems to have a lot of correction.
 
Terrywoodenpic said:
With Fuji X cameras in LIghtroom, all the corrections are made absolutely automatically ( it is built into part of the raw processor function, so it works the same in photoshop)... there is no way to turn them on or off. You can not even tell if anything has happened.... except for the absence of aberrations.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's quote common. More common than you might think and some manufacturers are a bit coy about it. Leica got caught with egg on their face recently, after boasting about the optical performance of the new Leica T it turns out that software is doing most of the work! Exposed here http://www.dpreview.com/previews/leica-t-typ701/7

It's interesting to note that Raw is, increasingly, not very 'raw'. It never has been TBH and there's all sort of stuff goes on under the bonnet with colour correction and ISO and noise. Some of this is baked into the Raw data, but these lens corrections are not it seems. They are applied post-capture by software, but most software (like Adobe) picks it up by default and you can do nothing about it. Some basic processors don't though. Raw really refers to the totally fluid nature of the data, rather than meaning it's not been tinkered with.
 
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