Guided Upright

[Chris Kern]

This looks like a useful addition to Lightroom's toolset.  I tried it out on a couple of images where the standard Upright tool was unsuccessful in adjusting the perspective and my manual corrections didn't satisfy me.  (No doubt reflecting my own limitations in using the controls, although on less difficult images I am almost always able to correct perspective manually at least as well as the standard Upright tool.)

The first attachment is a Victorian-era home in my neighborhood that I shot one evening a couple of week ago while my wife and were taking a walk after dinner.  I didn't have a wide enough lens on my "walk-around" camera (a Fuji X-E2), so I stood where I could get the view of the house that I wanted and shot a hand-held pano; I did the best I could to manually adjust the five-image stitch, but it clearly wasn't right.  The second attachment, made using the Upright guides, is definitely better.

The second pair of images is a view of the Washington Athletic Club, a fine Art Deco building in downtown Seattle, made early in the morning from our hotel room during a short visit to that city last year.  The perspective of the Guided Upright version more accurately represents the way my eyes and brain interpreted the scene than the manually-corrected image, as well as doing better with the verticals at each side of the frame.  I used a little content-aware fill in Photoshop in the top corners of the Guided Upright attachment, but all the other post-processing was done in Lightroom.

[rdonson]

Nice work, Chris, and good examples of the use of Guided Upright to perfect an already well crafted photograph.

[graeme]

I'm liking what I've seen of the guided upright so far.

[dwswager]

Yeah, it brings a lighter weight and helpful tool similar to the features in Photoshop to Camera Raw and Lightroom.  The more we can do non destructive, the more helpful!

[Chris Kern]

Nice work, Chris, and good examples of the use of Guided Upright to perfect an already well crafted photograph.

Thanks, Ron.  I think this tool is going to make it easier—and much faster—to process images that require tricky perspective corrections.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Yeah, it brings a lighter weight and helpful tool similar to the features in Photoshop to Camera Raw and Lightroom.  The more we can do non destructive, the more helpful!

While true, do note that the parametric adjustments will translate to reduced interpolation quality output. In final output, resampling will have to take place, and it's that resampling that poses a risk. That's why I also advise against routinely employing lens distortion corrections when they are not strictly needed (e.g. in most Landscape scenarios, or Portraits, or anything else that doesn't involve straight lines, or lenses that have little distortion).

Especially small distortion corrections combined with a little bit of rotation and keystone correction, will hurt fine detail like that in surface and material structure. Even the best resampling algorithms have difficulty in balancing sharpness and noise/detail, as demonstrated here.

The User-assisted Upright functionality is a useful addition for a fast workflow, so now it would be interesting to also compare the impact on output quality to e.g. Capture One that has had this type of manual perspective correction by placing two or four control lines for ages, but since Version 9 also improved the resampling quality. LR already had reasonable quality resampling, better than Photoshop. Maybe it's interesting for another thread (because off-topic here) to compare the both.

Cheers,
Bart

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Thanks, Ron.  I think this tool is going to make it easier—and much faster—to process images that require tricky perspective corrections.

Chris, I agree. It's most frustrating if the automated approach fails to deliver, and there is no manual intervention possible. Now there is.

Cheers,
Bart

[Redcrown]

The new Guided Upright is certainly a useful addition for Lightroom only users. But it appears to be a crippled version of the Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Photoshop. Why only 2 vertical and only 2 horizontal guides? Makes me suspicious that those limits are on purpose.

In my brief and limited tests, the Adaptive Wide Angle filter beat the Guided Upright every time. Of course, AWA takes a lot longer to set up given you are likely to draw many more lines. And AWA has some drawbacks of its own plus at least one bug.

As for interpolation errors, I'm impressed by both tools. I don't know any way to evaluate other than visual inspection and I see little damage even with very strong corrections. In most cases I think interpolation errors (artifacts, unsharpness) are a far lesser evil than gross distortions.

One major difference I saw in results was on round structures (grain silos, round buildings). The Guided Upright correction left the curved tops strangely skewed, while AWA makes them look more normal.

[dwswager]

The new Guided Upright is certainly a useful addition for Lightroom only users. But it appears to be a crippled version of the Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Photoshop. Why only 2 vertical and only 2 horizontal guides? Makes me suspicious that those limits are on purpose.

Not sure if there is a conspiracy, but certainly the 2/2 limit in ACR and Lr is arbitrary.  But they are done non-destructively as opposed to having to go to bitmap in Ps.

[adias]

Here is a link with some architectural shots where 'Guided Upright' was used - Link HERE.

[AFairley]

The new Guided Upright is certainly a useful addition for Lightroom only users. But it appears to be a crippled version of the Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Photoshop. Why only 2 vertical and only 2 horizontal guides? Makes me suspicious that those limits are on purpose.

Seems to me that their purpose is to easily correct convergence, in essence replicating what a lens shift would.  For that you only need 2v and 2h.  The AWA filter in PS is more like a full on warp tool.