Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: Mike Arst on April 13, 2010, 11:05:46 pm
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Recently I saw one of the 'teaser' videos about CS5 -- a video that included a brief mention of new lens-correction capabilities. Well, that's downright interesting. I realize that a lot of information about CS5 remains confidential per NDA, until the official program launch, but if anyone who's been working with it is authorized to comment on the lens-correction features, I would surely be interested to know:
Do these features include not just corrections of geometric distortion, but also lens "softness" corrections of the sort offered in the RAW converter DxO Optics Pro? I realize that there are a ton of sharpening applications -- I've used a bunch of them. But I've never seen "lens unsharpness" correction to rival what comes out of DxO Optics Pro -- if, that is, you're able to get a lens module that works with a particular shot. (If no module is available for a particular lens, you're stuck with conventional unsharp masking. In which case, you might as well use an application like Focus Fixer or PK Sharpener, both of which do a way better job than mere unsharp masking, in my experience.)
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Do these features include not just corrections of geometric distortion, but also lens "softness" corrections of the sort offered in the RAW converter DxO Optics Pro?
No, not yet...they only control lens distortion, lateral CS and vignette...
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No, not yet...they only control lens distortion, lateral CS and vignette...
Thanks for the info. I assumed that was the deal -- but hope springs eternal. I wonder what kind of Special Sauce it takes to get that DxO-style lens-unsharpness correction; it's extremely effective. Seems to me DxO will have to struggle pretty hard to compete with Lightroom, perhaps even as a niche or special-interest product. They just don't seem to be able to make lens correction modules very quickly. Someone who gets, say, the latest in the Nikon D3 series will have to wait quite a while for certain camera+lens combinations to be supported. Maybe DxO should just have licensed their lens-correction technologies to Adobe...
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The "2010 processing engine" in Lightroom 3 (and presumably ACR 6.0) seem to have some special mojo for soft images.
In testing some new primes I noticed that if I invoke "2010 processing" in Lightroom Beta 3, it seems like the apparent diffraction differences between f16, 11, 8, and 5.6 are reduced in a way that is not possible in ACR 5.x.
It goes beyond than I can do with the current ACR sharpening, clarity, contrast etc. Once subjected to the "2010" magic, f16 on an 85mm and f11 on a 50mm and f8 on a 35mm no longer seem to carry a mushy diffraction penalty compared to wider more optimal stops. For instance with the 85mm the qualitative image differences between f16 and f8 are essentially reduced to depth of field only. The improvement is really very dramatic.
Nice for us full-frame landscape mongers.
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Interesting. I have v.3 b2 here but I haven't messed with the 'yyyy processing' options.
You have your hands on beta *3* of v.3?
The "2010 processing engine" in Lightroom 3 (and presumably ACR 6.0) seem to have some special mojo for soft images.
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This is in Beta 3.2 that I downloaded a few days ago from the public site. In the "Develop" screen there is (sometimes) a small "!" button to the lower right, if you click it the 2010 processing is applied and the view is split into before and after versions. Pretty impressive. For previously processed images you will probably want to reduce the sharpening settings, the 2010 sharpening is a whole new ballgame.
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This is in Beta 3.2 that I downloaded a few days ago from the public site. In the "Develop" screen there is (sometimes) a small "!" button to the lower right, if you click it the 2010 processing is applied and the view is split into before and after versions. Pretty impressive. For previously processed images you will probably want to reduce the sharpening settings, the 2010 sharpening is a whole new ballgame.
I'll definitely have a look at the 2010 settings. I'm usually underwhelmed by RAW conversion tools' sharpening routines but I'll take a look at that also. I've become spoiled by two kick-*ss sharpening tools, one being the "lens softness" correction in DxO Optics Pro (works of course only if there's a module available for the lens used for the shot you want to sharpen). It's quite remarkable. The other is a super-slow but extremely effective PS plug-in called FocusFixer. It's quite unlike any other sharpening tool I've used before (until I encountered the DxO sharpening routines) and I'm willing to wait for the thing to take its time to complete...unless I have to sharpen a bunch of images. Then the glacial processing times become oppressive.