George Washington Bridge

GadgetRick

I love bridges and was by the GWB the other day to shoot at sunset. Decided to play with Lightroom a bit and came up with this...



18mm
1/200
f11
ISO 100

My question is this, I shot it with a Canon EF-S 18-200mm. I know it's famous for it's barrel distortion at 18mm. I tried to go into the Canon DPP software to correct this. Seemed like it did but I'm still seeing the distortion. I did it after I had done pp on it--I shoot in RAW and edit in RAW as much as I can--and figured I'd still be ok since it's still all RAW. Aren't the changes you make to a RAW file just meta data attached to the RAW file? I figured it would fix the RAW file which would fix this file since it's just another version using the same RAW data but with different meta data. Am I missing something? I'm trying to figure out how to fix the barrel distortion.

Thanks.

Richard

Nice shot, Rick. Since your questions have to do with processing, I moved this to Finishing School. It's an interesting question, but I'm afraid I don't know the answer.

GadgetRick

Richard wrote:

Nice shot, Rick. Since your questions have to do with processing, I moved this to Finishing School. It's an interesting question, but I'm afraid I don't know the answer.

Whoops, sorry about that. But thanks for the compliment. I really like the pic but would like to figure out the distortion problem. I'm thinking of printing it.

RalphAdam

GadgetRick wrote:

I love bridges and was by the GWB the other day to shoot at sunset. Decided to play with Lightroom a bit and came up with this...



It is a great shot. Have you tried the lens distortion filter in PS? I get good results, sometimes in combination with the perspective crop. I, too, like straight sides and not having the structure bend backwards --

GadgetRick

Well, downloaded PTLens. Free trial for 10 images but I'll be buying this puppy! Here's the corrected image...



My only (minor) complaint is the buildings in the bottom right are slightly off now. But not bad and the bridge is the main focus anyway. I like the buildings there to balance the photo or I'd crop them out.

GadgetRick

On second thought, I tried cropping the buildings out. Looks better and the buildings leaning don't distract me.



Which one do you think works better?

pathfinder

I use Transform> Warp in Photoshop to correct image distortion at times. On 16 bit images seems to work fine without apparent damage to the image.

I don't use DPP so I cannot answer with regard to that.

I do not know how to correct barrel distortion in Adobe Camera Raw, but Transform>Warp works for me in CS4.

Richard

pathfinder wrote:

I use Transform> Warp in Photoshop to correct image distortion at times. On 16 bit images seems to work fine without apparent damage to the image.

I don't use DPP so I cannot answer with regard to that.

I do not know how to correct barrel distortion in Adobe Camera Raw, but Transform>Warp works for me in CS4.

As of 4.6, there is no barrel distortion correction feature in ACR; I don't know what later versions contain. I use PTLens from time to time, but mostly I rely on cropping with perspective correction. Once in a while I have to use free transform to undo weird proportions introduced by perspective changes. DPP 3.5 does seem to have some lens distortion feature, but I can't seem to get it do anything.

GadgetRick

Ok, I think I've got it done.



Combo of PT Lens and PS Distort filter.

pathfinder

Looks good!