Correcting Wide Angle Distortion

Question

Level 1

8 points

Correcting Wide Angle Distortion

Is there a way in Aperture to correct photos for vertical distortion (skewing) caused by using a wide-angle lens? Tall buildings, such as church towers, are not perpendicular to the ground due to this distortion. I understand there is skewing correcting in PhotoShop (which I don't have), but I can't find anything in Aperture. Thanks.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jun 28, 2008 5:40 PM

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Answer 1

tidysteve

Level 4

2,975 points

Jun 28, 2008 8:20 PM in response to Photo23

in aperture, no ... but there are/is plugins available (for $$$$) that i believe do this ... I haven't tried it yet ... still use PS ... search here or apple downloads for them ... one that has been discussed recently is Edit 1.1(?) by Human Soft (?) ...

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Answer 2

Jun 29, 2008 1:59 AM in response to tidysteve

Gimp does this for free, along with almost everything else PS does. Limitations on output, obviously.

Message was edited by: timelapseshooter

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Answer 3

ScotMij

Level 7

21,913 points

Jun 29, 2008 5:36 AM in response to Photo23

Photoshop Elements 6 has this feature and works well enough for me. You can nominate PE6 as an external editor.

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Answer 4

Pistol

Level 1

70 points

Jun 29, 2008 7:31 AM in response to Photo23

Here's what I discovered:

http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/index.html

It's called PTLens. It's a plug in for Aperture. $15

Give it a look...

Kent

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Answer 5

Jun 29, 2008 8:19 AM in response to Pistol

Thanks for that link, good to see such a plugin for Aperture, it works well and $15 is the right price. There is no way I'm going to pay more than Aperture costs for a plugin.

I primarily want to correct CA and until Aperture supports this natively, PTlens will suffice, although of course it requires that a .tiff is created which takes up more disk space.

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Answer 6

Photo23 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 1, 2008 4:28 PM in response to Pistol

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try this plug-in.

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Answer 7

Photo23 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 1, 2008 4:30 PM in response to ScotMij

Thanks for the suggestion. I will give this a look if PTlens doesn't work.

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Answer 8

Jul 2, 2008 12:16 AM in response to Photo23

Make sure you download the very latest version - the author has been steadily improving the plug-in and it should now be more stable, the early versions had a habit of crashing at odd times.

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Answer 9

Jul 2, 2008 9:00 AM in response to D Anderson

The author of PTLens has been very responsive regarding some issues I was having with the Aperture Plugin over the last two days and he has solved them.

If anyone has experienced problems with the PTLens plugin, they should download the latest version from his site again, as there have been several updates.

Interestingly he was unaware of the problems with the Aperture plugin until I contacted him, so it pays to let software authors (particularly Shareware), know of any problems, as they are interested in fixing their software. As a software developer myself I know I welcome bug reports and suggestions for improvements.

I'd like to point out I have no association with the PTLens software, other than as a customer.

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Answer 10

bazineta

Level 1

10 points

Jul 2, 2008 11:04 AM in response to Photo23

Thanks for the post on PTLens; great plugin at a great price. Appreciate you making us aware of it here.

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