Lens/Barrel Distortion

golfman

As a few of you may know I'm on a mission to improve my interior property photography.

I'm currently using my G10 with a wide angle lens attachment. The annoying thing is I'm finding every picture has lens/barrel distortion and its taking me ages to correct all my pictures. If I were to go down the route of an entry level dslr with a 10-22 lens would I be facing the same issues all the time?

melekalikimaka

golfman wrote: »

As a few of you may know I'm on a mission to improve my interior property photography.

I'm currently using my G10 with a wide angle lens attachment. The annoying thing is I'm finding every picture has lens/barrel distortion and its taking me ages to correct all my pictures. If I were to go down the route of an entry level dslr with a 10-22 lens would I be facing the same issues all the time?

depends on what ya mean exactly, examples possibly?

you will always get distortion at wide angles, but with those lens attachments, they usually make things worse and alot harder to correct. What distance is the subject?

golfman

I've just spent the entire morning correcting these but here is an unedited one to show you what I mean.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37217005@N04/4478529311/in/photostream/

I'm just taking pictures of interiors so its a not a great distance at all.

pete4130

The wide angle attachments are generally cheap pieces of glass and have worse distortions than a 10-20mm or 12-14mm lens on an entry level DSLR.

Once you keep the DSLR level then that will keep any distortion to a minimum. Sometime it cant be avoided if verticals are very close in distance and in the frame to the corners.

You can adust distortion in photoshop by clicking FILTER>DISTORT>LENS CORRECTION and there is a slider in there to expand or contract the top or bottom of an image to bring your distorted verticals back to being, well vertical. It will mean you'll have to crop the image slightly though.

Ballyman

golfman wrote: »

If I were to go down the route of an entry level dslr with a 10-22 lens would I be facing the same issues all the time?

Pretty much. Wouldn't matter what camera you had either as it's the lens that causes the distortion.

You could create an Action in PS that would do this for you automatically. It prob wouldn't get it right 100% of the time but it would save you time.

How many shots are you taking anyway? Surely you wold have only 20 or 30 max shots of an interior? That wouldn't take that long to fix.

Unfortunately there is no "Fix Everything For Me" button on any camera/lens/software

melekalikimaka

Ballyman wrote: »

Pretty much. Wouldn't matter what camera you had either as it's the lens that causes the distortion.

You could create an Action in PS that would do this for you automatically. It prob wouldn't get it right 100% of the time but it would save you time.

How many shots are you taking anyway? Surely you wold have only 20 or 30 max shots of an interior? That wouldn't take that long to fix.

Unfortunately there is no "Fix Everything For Me" button on any camera/lens/software

dxo optics ftw

golfman

pete4130 wrote: »

The wide angle attachments are generally cheap pieces of glass and have worse distortions than a 10-20mm or 12-14mm lens on an entry level DSLR.

Once you keep the DSLR level then that will keep any distortion to a minimum. Sometime it cant be avoided if verticals are very close in distance and in the frame to the corners.

You can adust distortion in photoshop by clicking FILTER>DISTORT>LENS CORRECTION and there is a slider in there to expand or contract the top or bottom of an image to bring your distorted verticals back to being, well vertical. It will mean you'll have to crop the image slightly though.

I've been fixing it using GIMP and the "Lens Distortion" tool which I imagine is quite similar. Its just a slow and tedious process that I would like to cut out.......

golfman

Ballyman wrote: »

How many shots are you taking anyway? Surely you wold have only 20 or 30 max shots of an interior? That wouldn't take that long to fix.

I photographed 7 properties yesterday..... Its been a bit of a ball-ache I can tell you.

Ballyman

melekalikimaka wrote: »

dxo optics ftw

ghf hhuygtr kkmn

Ghost Train

You probably still have to correct for distortion, if you check dpreview you can probably find some reviews and samples like this http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/sigma_10-20_4-5p6_n15/

Borderfox

Every lens has distortion the wider the lens the more it usually will have. I tried the 17mm tse lens last week and found it to be superb for exterior and interior shots but at a big price, safe to say though if was doing more property shots then I would get either that or the 24mm

stunt_penguin

The Sigma 10-20mm for Canon has very minimal distortion even at 10mm... I'd have a look for some interior shots taken with that and see what you think

Heebie

I have the same lens for Pentax, and it's good, but you still do get some distortion.
The more spherical the lens, the greater the distortion, which is one of the reasons that an "adapter" is likely to have more distortion than a good aspherical wide-angle or extra-wide angle lens on a DSLR. (an adapter is more likely to be spherical in order to keep "dead zones"? in the light transfer to a minimum.)

If you wanted to get really fancy shift & tilt equipment, or a true bellows view camera, you could compensate more for it.. but it's probably not worth it.

One potential "trick" if you have a camera with lots of megapixels to play with.. is get a really really really really wide angle.. keep the lens as wide as it can go.. and crop out a section within the photo to actually use. The closer you are to the edge of the frame, the greater your parallax error. (and the wider the angle on the lens, the greater as well.)

You could also try using a panorama "stitching" program and use several shots.

stunt_penguin wrote: »

The Sigma 10-20mm for Canon has very minimal distortion even at 10mm... I'd have a look for some interior shots taken with that and see what you think