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Re: [OM] What to buy for architectural photography at a budget?

Subject: Re: [OM] What to buy for architectural photography at a budget?
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:18:05 -0700
  On 10/18/2010 4:57 PM, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> No PhotoShop required.  You can use PTLens which is better than PhotoShop and 
> costs only $25.

Not better for me. the 'vertical tilt, horizontal tilt, angle' model used in 
both PTLens and the Lens Correction filters 
in ACR and PS just doesn't work well for me. I worked on a skylight image for 
ages in it and never did get what I 
considered a fully satisfactory result.

I much prefer the PS Edit=>Transform functions. They just work much better for 
me. I can combine perspective correction 
with Distort, Rotate and Warp. (Yeah, I know, they aren't available in ACR. I 
don't serious editing in ACR anyway.)

I not uncommonly find slight irregularities in straight features that require 
more than overall correction. I don't know 
if they are subtle errors in the PTL linear distortion or what, but Warp fixes 
'em. I love that I can switch between 
tools in Transform, do all kinds of fooling around, and have it all applied to 
the underlying image at once. There's no 
cumulative artifact creation from multiple corrections.

I assume other image editors have perspective correction functions. (PWP has a 
Warp function, but it's a completely 
different thing than in PS. It's the perspective correction tool, and less 
intuitive to use.)

> While those of us with PhotoShop use the plug-in version, PTLens also comes 
> as a stand-alone version and also as an external editor for Lightroom.  Both 
> PC and Mac are supported.
> <http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/index.html>

To make it clearer, the $25 buys you both plug-in and stand alone versions, for 
life. I think I bought in at $5, years 
ago. Talk about getting value for money!

> One really great feature of PTLens is a database of lenses which has built-in 
> distortion correction parameters.  ...  For digital images having lens data 
> in the EXIF data the correct lens is chosen automatically.

Yup. Slick as a whistle. I love PTLens, particularly as I have lenses with 
really interesting waveform distortion at 
their wide ends. :-)

> If you're going to be be bending pixels to correct perspective than having 
> lots of pixels is an advantage to help maintain resolution.

The more the merrier, for distortion correction. Still, I've never had a 
problem I noticed with the 5D's ~13 MPs.

Moose
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