Adobe shows early details of Lens Correction Solution features in the upcoming release of Lightroom 3 and the Camera RAW 6 plug-in for CS5 in online video.
Tom Hogarty, the ADOBE Lightroom Product Manager in a video available from the Lightroom Blog previews the added Lens Correction implemented with Lens Profiles and Manual Correction.
Initially included will be selected profiles for lenses from Canon, Nikon, and Sigma. From the demo video it also appears that possibly some Leitz/Leica glass will be included in the profile list. These selections will be correctable for barrel and pincushion distortions, chromatic aberration (the dreaded CA color fringing), and lens vignetting (will aid with corner falloff and sharpness). One part of the demo I find very interesting is that with this correction technology that irregular aberrations also will be more easily resolved. Some things you just cannot fix with warping and bending and straightening unless a lot of time is available. One example is a wave distortion being remedied with a lens profile. This distortion correction technology has significant algorithmic capability hidden just under the surface to fix these serious types of ‘flaws’. Neat ‘auto’ or ‘available picture’ crop button also demonstrated.
Added Manual Correction tools can override or be applied to non-profiled lens models. The ‘volume’ concept from ADOBE is continued with the use of the term to explain greater or lesser application of each adjustment. Non-traditional rotational tools are being added to give even more adjustment and correction capability to this new tool from ADOBE.
Profile generation tools are being made available for users to generate their own lens correction data in conjunction with this added set of features. After all the number of combination of lens and cameras is huge. Legacy lens or cross manufacturer lens users will benefit from being able to fix problems easily that can result from adapters or not perfect mountings among other things!
There are two ways to view the demonstration video. The first is to visit the Lightroom Blog page listed below. Hogarty’s blog contains some added information to the video and comment space for feedback.
Lightroom Journal – Preview of Lens Correction Solution for ACR 6 and Lightroom 3. (link)
The second way is to directly view the video, not the added commenary and no direct link to the user feedback comment, on YouTube.
Your comments and feedback are encouraged.
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Thanks for posting this article, Carleton. When I first saw the announcement about the lens corrections I didn’t think it was a big deal. But the more I think about it the more significant I realize it is. To be fair, DxO has been doing lens correction software for a few years now. But I’m sure a lot more of us are using Lightroom and Photoshop than DxO’s Optics Pro software. It’s important to make people aware that this isn’t a brand new idea from Adobe, though.
The biggest benefit for me is going to be chromatic abberation correction. That’s something I usually don’t look for so it will be nice to have the software automatically detect and correct it. I also find it interesting that Sigma is included with Nikon and Canon in the initial profiles. I don’t think Sigma gets quite enough recognition. But in our user reviews, Sigma is always among the top three most-popular manfacturers, the other two being Nikon and Canon. So it makes sense for them to be included in the initial release.
Lens Correction at the RAW level is one of the highlights in my opinion. The algorithm has the greatest amount of information to work with for all of the above corrections and those embedded in the tool set. It is one less external or plug-in step to have to resort to for problems, and makes more lens and camera combination’s viable.
Chromatic Aberration can get the best of any of us or the finest piece of optics we own under adverse or harsh conditions. PS and LR currently both have CA tools but again, the documentation on them is either buried in a technical bulletin, only available through limited sources (i.e. one manual, one seminar, or a passing reference in a READ_ME file) or not complete. Lightroom keeps tweaking up how much that CA tool will fix, but it isn’t being heralded very much. Auto correction at some point is necessary!
Though various software including DxO has been around to repair/remedy Optical Aberration for some time I’ve found a lot of it tedious or incomplete. Or it makes auto assumptions that I don’t want or need to fix ‘everything’ at the same time. Adobe so far has continued to demo both manual and Auto version but most importantly they are going to provide the tools to let users build correction modules for any lens they own. I don’t know of any other vendor that comes vaguely close and provides the tool set for free. (or reported free at this time)
Adobe and Sigma made a big point in announcing their cooperation in this arena. Of course Sigma has sold a lot of the super wide/fisheye units for the APS-C lens format and a bunch of wide/normal zooms that will benefit from such profiling.
The other part of this that can’t go with mentioning again is the older cameras and lens units available that aren’t perfect. Early adopters or experimenters with Digital found that some of their most cherished lenses were flawed in a way that digital just didn’t take kindly to. This may be just what they’ve wanted. I know I’ve got a couple of units that I’d use in a minute if profiling them fixed a specific issue enough.
The CA tools may also be very helpful with color shifts in some camera makes that just keep popping up because a particular lens has a coating that just doesn’t work the best in certain mixed lighting.
If well implemented and properly updated/maintained this may be one of the best features that Adobe has released for a while for the Photoshop and photography world.
Adobe has now released an initial version of the Adobe Lens Profile Creator Software. This release is available through the Adobe Labs webpages.
I have searched the web and cannot find out what lenses Lightroom 3 for lens correction.
Does anybody know anything about this.
I’ve been trying the Lightroom 3 trial, having previously trialled LR2 and deciding against it (mainly due to poor performance on my PC), and the incorporation of lens correction profiles in LR3 were of great interest to me. However the ACR corrections (even with the new 2010 engine) still don’t seem able to match CaptureNX2 for CA correction – in a recent test on what I’ll admit was a challenging image, NX2 managed to remove all trace of CA perfectly in auto mode. Conversely, LR3 left very visible CA which could not be removed either in auto lens profile mode, or using the manual controls. The auto mode did improve it, but didn’t remove all of it (and some combinations of settings made the effect dramatically worse). I couldn’t completely get to the bottom of what interplay of settings was causing this, but I think it was possibly a combination of recovery and fill light which, when combined, left some significant CA that the lens profile couldn’t clean up completely. In NX2 I was using the equivalent controls (highlights and shadows sliders) but this combination didn’t seem to effect NX2′s ability to fix the CA in the image. Now as I said, this was a very challenging image, but then it’s in just such situations that CA invariably causes problems and when you need to rely on these correction tools.
Now I’d be prepared to live with this, and revert to using NX2 for selected images where this is a problem, but here’s where LR3 again falls down for me – it seems to insist on ACR being the only RAW converter in town, which means that I can’t launch a RAW file into NX2 from LR3 (instead the best it will allow is through a conversion to TIFF, which is of course not what I need in these situations). So instead I’d have to process the file outside of LR3 prior to import, which is frankly painful. Given that LR3 is at least 50% an image file management solution this is a major drawback for me, and these two issues combined are preventing me from buying today.
This is shame, because in lots of other ways I find LR3 very impressive – the noise reduction for example is the best I’ve seen (seems to give better results more easily than a well known dedicated NR filter that I have installed in PS).