How accepting are you of camera distortion?

[FundyBrian]

I made this photo of the view from a lighthouse while visiting St. Martins recently. It's not a very exciting view but you don't often get a chance to make a picture from a lighthouse so I did the best I could with what was there. It looks normal enough, until you realize it has been edited quite a bit to straighten it.

This is the way the original photo turned out
My eyes didn't see this scene as crooked but the camera had to be tilted to get the composition I wanted. This tilting of the sensor plane in relation to the subject creates the distortion.
Years ago I did some photography work for architects. I used a 4x5 view camera that made it possible to keep vertical lines parallel, the way the architect drew them, and not convergent. Architects won't buy distorted photos.
Of course, you could also photograph using a shift lens on a regular camera, and nowadays we have several software methods to straighten distorted perspective. On the iPhone we have SHRWT and SKEW and Perspective.
The question is: do you care enough about camera distortion to take the extra step in your photo editing to correct it? Obviously, it depends on the situation. Sometimes the crookedness is interesting. But most important is being aware that the crookedness is one more deviation from reality made by the camera and not something you chose to do.

Recently I made this BeCasso rendition of a photo originally photographed using Fusion HDR. This was made during the half-time break in a concert at the Harvey Hall.

When I was finished with the HDR adjustments in Fusion I didn't save the photo as is but exported it directly to SKEW using the "open in" menu. From SKEW I went directly to BeCasso in the same way.
Here's the original result direct from Fusion.

An interesting aspect of this process, to me, is that I never even considered saving this step of the image. I had to reload the 3 brackets into Fusion later to remake the photo for this thread. That reveals to me that I didn't consider the crooked version worth saving, it was just a step along the way.
Now, obviously, the photo still shows some other types of distortion but those didn't bother me as much as the vertical distortion.
What do you feel about this?

 

[BoBo]

"The question is: do you care enough about camera distortion to take the extra step in your photo editing to correct it? Obviously, it depends on the situation. Sometimes the crookedness is interesting. But most important is being aware that the crookedness is one more deviation from reality made by the camera and not something you chose to do."

Absolutely! Unless the distortion is done by intention as part of the composition I really hate it when lines are not "set" the way they used to be. No idea why Snapseeds transform-option isn't used more often?!!

Another hard to swallow distortion - landscapes showing a non-horizontal horizon

 

[GroovyGouvy]

"The question is: do you care enough about camera distortion to take the extra step in your photo editing to correct it? Obviously, it depends on the situation. Sometimes the crookedness is interesting. But most important is being aware that the crookedness is one more deviation from reality made by the camera and not something you chose to do."

Absolutely! Unless the distortion is done by intention as part of the composition I really hate it when lines are not "set" the way they used to be. No idea why Snapseeds transform-option isn't used more often?!!

Another hard to swallow distortion - lanscapes showing a non-horizontal horizon

Agree with Bobo.
Plus: To me it's often a difference between a memory shot and one to print. For the memento I couldn't care less, but if I want it printed or as gift or it just looks wrong, yes I have to "repair" it.
Well, yes, it's also a question of HOW wrong it looks.
Even with SKEW and such I'm often not satisfied, because the straighten well, but only the ways they are concepted, and sometimes it needs just a little more on the left to be right. So I found I rather do it more manually and found two great tools that helps me a lot: FrontView and SideClipper. Last one is the newer of both and I love the way it works. You pull or squeeze every single corner of the image. The result is a kind of sometimes totally wonky oblong with no rectangled corners. That saves an can be cut in any app to the desired format. [emoji16]

 

[terse]

I usually correct vertical perspective distortion but not always all the way to dead straight, depending on the image. I suspect most people will accept some when the image contains something they know to be tall. Likewise with horizontal distortion. I always straighten horizons.

You can have a good image with one or more of these, even tilted horizons, but you have to do it like you mean it so that it's clearly done on purpose, for effect. Tilted horizons in particular are going to draw people's attention. If you want them to look at that, it's good. If you don't, it's bad because it breaks whatever hold the image might have on them.

 

[FundyBrian]

I wish I could correct the lens distortion on my iPhone the way I can in Lightroom. When you turn this correction on and off in Lightroom I am often surprised and dismayed at how distorted every image actually is. It's a bit like one of those "bulge" filter effects but that oversimplifies it.

 

[FundyBrian]

Have a look at this image that shows two round floor outlets. You can see they are no longer round at all. They were photographed straight down, parallel to the floor. This type of distortion is in every picture you make.

 

[FundyBrian]

Agree with Bobo.
Plus: To me it's often a difference between a memory shot and one to print. For the memento I couldn't care less, but if I want it printed or as gift or it just looks wrong, yes I have to "repair" it.
Well, yes, it's also a question of HOW wrong it looks.
Even with SKEW and such I'm often not satisfied, because the straighten well, but only the ways they are concepted, and sometimes it needs just a little more on the left to be right. So I found I rather do it more manually and found two great tools that helps me a lot: FrontView and SideClipper. Last one is the newer of both and I love the way it works. You pull or squeeze every single corner of the image. The result is a kind of sometimes totally wonky oblong with no rectangled corners. That saves an can be cut in any app to the desired format. [emoji16]

Distortion in photos is often more complex than we initially expect so it is easy to go wrong with adjustments in SKEW.

Note how my attempt to straighten up the steeple resulted in making the doors into parallelograms.
SKRWT seems to be more limited in adjustments but this is to ensure you change both sides of the picture equally to avoid this type of problem.

 

[Michal Sz.]

FundyBrian in the latest Lightroom they actually introduced Lens Corrections.

 

[FundyBrian]

FundyBrian in the latest Lightroom they actually introduced Lens Corrections.

Do you mean Lightroom mobile? I know it has been in the desktop Lightroom for 3 or 4 years. I'm not able to make use of the cloud services - not good enough connectivity. We have satellite internet as our only choice.[emoji35]

 

[Michal Sz.]

Yes, I mean Lughtroom mobile, and yes, you can use it offline in the free version (no CC subscription needed).

This the example image with lens corrections off.

This is the same image with lens corrections on. Please compare and notice the corrected aberrations in the corners and also brightened up vignette.

 

[FundyBrian]

I'll have to go and have another look at Lightroom mobile. I generally oppose anything CC.

 

[Michal Sz.]

... and the good thing is that lens corrections doesn't require CC.

 

[Philippe Schlossberg]

yeah ... their latest feature (called local adjust) requires a CC subscription. But they offer you a new 30 days CC trial to test it.

Adding that this "new" feature comes bundled in many other iOS photo apps [emoji51]

 

[Michal Sz.]

lens corrections is not a part of local adjust and as such, it doesn't require CC subscription.

 

[Philippe Schlossberg]

lens corrections is not a part of local adjust and as such, it doesn't require CC subscription.

I know, I never said it did.

 

[FundyBrian]

I appreciate the info.

 

[ImageArt]

View attachment 80242
I made this photo of the view from a lighthouse while visiting St. Martins recently. It's not a very exciting view but you don't often get a chance to make a picture from a lighthouse so I did the best I could with what was there. It looks normal enough, until you realize it has been edited quite a bit to straighten it.
View attachment 80243
This is the way the original photo turned out
My eyes didn't see this scene as crooked but the camera had to be tilted to get the composition I wanted. This tilting of the sensor plane in relation to the subject creates the distortion.
Years ago I did some photography work for architects. I used a 4x5 view camera that made it possible to keep vertical lines parallel, the way the architect drew them, and not convergent. Architects won't buy distorted photos.
Of course, you could also photograph using a shift lens on a regular camera, and nowadays we have several software methods to straighten distorted perspective. On the iPhone we have SHRWT and SKEW and Perspective.
The question is: do you care enough about camera distortion to take the extra step in your photo editing to correct it? Obviously, it depends on the situation. Sometimes the crookedness is interesting. But most important is being aware that the crookedness is one more deviation from reality made by the camera and not something you chose to do.

Recently I made this BeCasso rendition of a photo originally photographed using Fusion HDR. This was made during the half-time break in a concert at the Harvey Hall.
View attachment 80244
When I was finished with the HDR adjustments in Fusion I didn't save the photo as is but exported it directly to SKEW using the "open in" menu. From SKEW I went directly to BeCasso in the same way.
Here's the original result direct from Fusion.
View attachment 80245
An interesting aspect of this process, to me, is that I never even considered saving this step of the image. I had to reload the 3 brackets into Fusion later to remake the photo for this thread. That reveals to me that I didn't consider the crooked version worth saving, it was just a step along the way.
Now, obviously, the photo still shows some other types of distortion but those didn't bother me as much as the vertical distortion.
What do you feel about this?

I have got so used to seeing this sort of distortion that I often don't see it anymore unless a manipulation suddenly makes it apparent. Your corrected photo almost looks 'unnatural' my eye has been so retrained when looking at photos. And if I need to correct it, I really struggle to get all the parts in the right place!

However, horizons definitely bug me. Like Ted, have to correct these.

 

[FundyBrian]

I have got so used to seeing this sort of distortion that I often don't see it anymore unless a manipulation suddenly makes it apparent. Your corrected photo almost looks 'unnatural' my eye has been so retrained when looking at photos. And if I need to correct it, I really struggle to get all the parts in the right place!

However, horizons definitely bug me. Like Ted, have to correct these.

Yes, distorted photos are so widespread we are quite used to them. However, we never see that sort of distortion out in the real world. Should we just stop seeing distortion or accept it because it is so common? Perhaps, being more conscious of the differences between reality and the distorted view in photos is exactly what I'm getting at.
Certainly, horizons must be level. This is important enough that I am surprised more apps don't have the means to show you true level on-screen. The apps that do have levels make them too hard to see in "normal" difficult viewing situations outdoors. There are getting to be more apps that keep your photos/videos level even when you hold your device deliberately crooked.
To me these things reveal the amount of care the photographer has put into the image. Keeping vertical lines parallel is simply a matter of holding the camera parallel to the vertical plane.
Back in the film days we had to be more careful to photograph things correctly since it was so difficult to correct it later. The use of view cameras and shift lenses was more common. I certainly used both. A photographer photographing interiors would take great care to use a camera angle that kept the verticals parallel. Now we have the means to make things right with digital editing but can't be bothered.
I'm wondering if the use of wide angle lenses was less common back then. The "normal" lens on a camera would be 50mm and wide angle distortion is much less evident. Compact cameras have gradually moved towards 35mm and wider lenses as the new "normal", which they certainly are not, because it simplified making the camera smaller overall. Now every cell phone has a wide angle lens so our whole current generation of casual snapshots involves wide angle distortion. The wide angle distorted selfie portraits are especially awful.
I remember some years ago getting to know a commercial artist turned painter in his retirement years. He used a compact camera to make his field "notes" of scenes he wanted to paint. Every time I looked at his paintings the first impression that practically leapt out at me was "wide angle lens" because I was quite accustomed to making photos with different focal lengths. To me this is quite jarring in a painting. Yet when I mentioned it to him he was completely unaware of it. His camera had only a wide angle lens so he never had different perspectives to compare. It was so obvious to me his paintings were made from wide angle photos since this is a perspective never seen by the human eye, except through a camera lens. I knew another artist, this time a watercolour artist who became unable to walk around outdoors to find subjects to paint. I used to lend her stacks of prints with all sorts of subject matter and I would sometimes see a tree or a shed appear in her paintings. A major difference, though, was that she was very aware of the camera's perspective distortion and I would always notice the way she reimagined my wide angle views into normal human eye perspective. Even less common is the telephoto perspective in paintings.
When you look through the entire history of art painting you never see wide angle perspective in paintings until cameras with wide angles became common. I'm sure everyone remembers the "Keep on Truckin'" comic drawing from the hippy era. It was a parody of the extreme wide angle lens effect becoming popular in pop photos of the day. Funny, though, that the drawing was much more widely known, practically as an icon, than any of the wide angle photos of the day.

 

[Gennifer]

View attachment 80242
I made this photo of the view from a lighthouse while visiting St. Martins recently. It's not a very exciting view but you don't often get a chance to make a picture from a lighthouse so I did the best I could with what was there. It looks normal enough, until you realize it has been edited quite a bit to straighten it.
View attachment 80243
This is the way the original photo turned out
My eyes didn't see this scene as crooked but the camera had to be tilted to get the composition I wanted. This tilting of the sensor plane in relation to the subject creates the distortion.
Years ago I did some photography work for architects. I used a 4x5 view camera that made it possible to keep vertical lines parallel, the way the architect drew them, and not convergent. Architects won't buy distorted photos.
Of course, you could also photograph using a shift lens on a regular camera, and nowadays we have several software methods to straighten distorted perspective. On the iPhone we have SHRWT and SKEW and Perspective.
The question is: do you care enough about camera distortion to take the extra step in your photo editing to correct it? Obviously, it depends on the situation. Sometimes the crookedness is interesting. But most important is being aware that the crookedness is one more deviation from reality made by the camera and not something you chose to do.

Recently I made this BeCasso rendition of a photo originally photographed using Fusion HDR. This was made during the half-time break in a concert at the Harvey Hall.
View attachment 80244
When I was finished with the HDR adjustments in Fusion I didn't save the photo as is but exported it directly to SKEW using the "open in" menu. From SKEW I went directly to BeCasso in the same way.
Here's the original result direct from Fusion.
View attachment 80245
An interesting aspect of this process, to me, is that I never even considered saving this step of the image. I had to reload the 3 brackets into Fusion later to remake the photo for this thread. That reveals to me that I didn't consider the crooked version worth saving, it was just a step along the way.
Now, obviously, the photo still shows some other types of distortion but those didn't bother me as much as the vertical distortion.
What do you feel about this?

I'm a little late here but I must tell you that the shot from the light house is awesome. Distorted pictures may bother some however, in the news papers and magazines there are often distorted photos. We don't pay attention to the distortion because the subject of the image is not distorted. Baseball games for example, even still images the subject is perfect while the background is distorted.

Not sure if I've answered your question but you opened the door to a topic that doesn't get enough attention!

 

[FundyBrian]

Next I plan to discuss how this distortion affects pictures of people.

 

[FundyBrian]

I'm a little late here but I must tell you that the shot from the light house is awesome. Distorted pictures may bother some however, in the news papers and magazines there are often distorted photos. We don't pay attention to the distortion because the subject of the image is not distorted. Baseball games for example, even still images the subject is perfect while the background is distorted.

Not sure if I've answered your question but you opened the door to a topic that doesn't get enough attention!

I think we ignore the distortion because we have enough experience with cameras and realize the distortion is not the fault of the subject and this type of careless camera work is very common so we might as well get used to it. To some decree we mentally interpret what the subject is supposed to look like if the distortion weren't there.

 

[Gennifer]

Totally agree. I do however miss film because distortion was acceptable - it just was what it was and if anything, challenged us for next time. Now there are high expectations of what should be or is supposed to be since we've entered the digital realm. I respect distortion, still like noise and glare and other things analogue especially when it happens naturally.

 

[Gennifer]

Oh and to add to my previous comment: development is everything, right?? You can make a distorted photo that you're not pleased with morph into an image your eyes remain glued to!!!

 

[FundyBrian]

Here's my first example of distortion in photos of people. Fabi wanted a picture of her new hairdo to send her friends on FB. I started doing it and when I saw the first picture I said "ack" and went to get my Moment tele lens. Afterwards I thought I should make another picture without the tele lens because it made such a good comparison pair.
This first picture was made with the Moment tele lens which is equivalent to 60mm on a 35mm camera. Of course I could also have zoomed in but my iPhone camera of choice (Fusion) doesn't have any zoom function.

The is the bare iPhone 6 camera lens only with no zooming and no added lens. I wanted to put the two pictures right together with no text in between so it would be easier to compare them. If you tap on the first picture it will enlarge full size with no text and you can swipe left and right to compare the two photos.
Compared the the tele version the bare version essentials shows Fabi's face pushed outwards at the nose, ears farther back, forehead sloped back, roundness of cheeks exaggerated, chin more prominent. It's as though the bare version is a mean-spirited cartoon caricature. Sort of a Topogigo effect.
The iPhone camera lens is approximately equivalent to 30mm on a 35mm camera. On a 35mm camera or full frame DSLR, 50mm is considered the "normal" lens, although something even longer is preferred for portraits of people. 90 to 115mm is considered ideal.
You can plainly see that the iPhone's wide angle lens does not make for attractive close up pictures of people. Looking back and forth between the two pictures of Fabi the amount of distortion in the bare iPhone version is alarming. It's no wonder why many people don't like to be photographed, especially close up.

You notice another thing from the examples is that even with the background so close there is much more background showing with the bare iPhone version (although Fabi is obviously sitting a bit closer to the window in the 2nd photo). This means the tele lens makes it easier to manage the background distractions. If you look at the window frame in the bare iPhone photo, I rotated the picture a bit until the inner edge (white meeting brown wood) was exactly vertical. And yet, just 8cm, or 3", to the right you can already see that next part of the window frame is already slanted away from vertical. That's how soon the distortion becomes visible.
Now the question is: if it was you having your portrait made, would you want the wide angle version? Of course not. No one would.

My next distortion example will show a full length picture of a person.

 

[BoBo]

"Now the question is: if it was you having your portrait made, would you want the wide angle version? Of course not. No one would."

You're right. But let's guess that unfortunately there's still the majority of those selfie people out there who don't care and like it not to have to deal with DOF (a benefit of wide angle lenses), right?

@ Android users
"Toolwiz Photos 8" offers lens correction. Well, TBH - I haven't checked that option. But the app is worth a look anyway!

FundyBrian
I had a try and tweaked the window section of your wide angle shoot with Snaapseed's transform-option.
IMHO it went fine while it might have add some more distraction. If you want to discuss let me know and I'll post it.