Automated Perspective Correction in Lightroom 5

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
I know we have a lot of Lightroom users here, some on previous versions and I'm sure we all tend to use it very differently. I used to use it for the bulk of my post processing, but since I've incorporated the Nik Collection and Photoshop in my workflow I've relegated it to more of a catalog system. That said, the one module I still always use is Lens Corrections. Adobe has done a fine job in profiling various lenses so that at a click of a button you can remove distortion, vignetting and other "imperfections" typical of that lens. These features are part of the Adobe Camera RAW module and available to Photoshop users as well, so in older versions of Lightroom there was no difference working in ACR vs. LR. But that's all changed in LR 5.

Adobe introduced a series of automated corrections with Lightroom 5 that analyze the content of your photo and apply specific perspective corrections for you. These automated corrections areonly available in Lightroom and not in ACR. The 4 types of auto-corrections available are...

Auto: Balanced level, aspect ratio, and perspective corrections

Level: Perspective corrections are weighted toward horizontal details

Vertical: Perspective corrections are weighted toward vertical details and level corrections

Full: Combination of full Level, Vertical, and Auto perspective corrections


Since I'm there already I will almost always cycle through these corrections to see what LR will do with my photo. More times than not I tend to have an issue with getting perfect horizontal lines, even when I pay very careful attention to what I'm shooting, so a quick click on Auto usually fixes things rather nicely. Usually. LOL More times than not that's the only correction I check, but depending on the subject I sometimes will look at others, particularly when I've got buildings leaning away or the thing I'm shooting is not square to the camera.

I was shooting a church yesterday with my 24-120mm and I when I ran one particular shot through the varied corrections I was floored at the various looks I got. So for those of you either not using LR5, or not using this feature, I thought it might be interesting to see what it's capable of.

Here's a copy of the photo straight out of the camera (shot at 24mm on a D800):

_D805262.jpg

...and here it is with just the Profile Correction for the lens applied.

_D805262-2.jpg

Comparing the two you can see there was pincushion distortion and vignetting removed. The profiling, to my knowledge, takes into account the full sweep range of a zoom, so corrections applied at 24mm would be different from those applied at 120mm on the same lens. As I said, it's something I've always used, and it's available in the last 3 releases of LR and in ACR (as well as the ACR-lite version used by PS Elements).

Now this is where the fun starts. Here is the same photo with the Auto correction applied.

_D805262-3.jpg

If you bounce back and forth between this and the previous image it looks like someone grabbed the upper right corner an pulled it towards you, giving a nice, balanced perspective along with good vertical and horizontal lines.

Here is the Level adjustment. This is less severe than Auto with this photo, merely correcting my almost consistent lean to the left on vertical shots. It's very similar the original showing only a slight rotation to the right.

_D805262-4.jpg

Next is the Vertical adjustment. As the description states, this correction focuses purely on trying to get all vertical lines straight.

_D805262-5.jpg

As you can see, in making this correction the bottom dimension of the photo had to be squeezed, leaving dead space to the right and left. In some cases it's possible to correct this using Content Aware Fill in Photoshop, but that's not always the case. LR does provide a box that you can check that will automatically constrain the results of each filter to the largest possible viewable area of the photo. Unfortunately, when you check it and an adjustment is made, unchecking the box does not automatically reset the crop, so you have to invoke the Crop tool and manually reset it. Because of this if I want to crop I just do it manually instead of checking the Constrain Crop box.

The last auto-correction is Full. This attempts to maximize both the vertical and horizontal corrections, and also invokes some of the algorithmic corrections used in Auto. Because of the nature of this correction it will auto-crop to the largest fully populated photo, leaving no dead space.

_D805262-6.jpg

It was seeing this view of the photo that made me decide to write this as it's a view I could not have achieved while shooting due to limitations of space and equipment. It's also one that I could not have derived from the various sliders available in ACR - at least I wasn't able to do so in 15 minutes of trying (the click took under a second). It's slightly too exaggerated for me on the far right edge, but I really like the look otherwise.

The cool thing is that while the Full button cropped automatically, the image information isn't lost. So after I've applied any of the automatic corrections I can then apply my own manual corrections using the transformation sliders and pieces of the photo that were cropped away come back automatically. I decided to reduce the horizontal perspective correction and brought that back to -17. This introduced a bit of a crooked look to it, so I applied 1.2 degrees of rotation. This left me with some dead space in the bottom right corner, but it's all snow and easily fixed in Photoshop with content aware fill.

_D805262-7.jpg


So, I might as well complete the thing, so I sent this off to PS where I fixed the corner with Content Aware Fill. I then got rid of the pickup truck and some extraneous and distracting branches on the left and peaking over the mid-roof. From there I popped it into Viveza to adjust light and color, and then to Color Efex Pro to apply the same Color Contrast I'd used on shots I processed from my Fisheye yesterday. Voila!!

_D805262-Edit.jpg
 

Ruidoso Bill

Senior Member
Looks like a great time saver. Perspective correction is something the "Amatures" regularly ignore and when you are using a wide lens it is so important to do. When using my 14-24 I typically us the transform tools in PS to correct vertical but it does take a little time so thanks for the great write up, now I have a reason to upgrade LR4 to LR5 The content aware features in CS6 (think it started in CS5) are great tools but I have been on a learning curve to shoot less tight and with the 36 MP crop it to my liking after fixing it.
 
Last edited:

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
I missed this post the first time around--good info to know. Thanks, Jake. :)
 
Top