Tweaking Your Canon Lens Performance
September 12, 2011 13 Comments
Whether you’re shooting with Canon, Nikon, Pentax or Lumix DSLRs, the lenses we use have optical characteristics that are imperfect. Some of these perfections we hate, some we love – and some we love just some of the time!
Take the wide-angle lens. Most wide-angles, including the 24mm Canon TSE used to take the photo here, exhibit some light falloff towards the edges. This is only to be expected when you apply the laws of physics. Sometimes the ‘vignetting’ is a useful compositional tool, but on other occasions, you’d prefer an even exposure across the frame.
You can also find some barrel or pin-cushion distortion (curvature) in most wide-angles, especially zoom wide-angle lenses.
Image with no Lens Correction
Neither of these ailments are difficult to fix. In fact, in Capture One they are extremely easy to fix – simply visit the Lens Correction Tab and slide the Distortion and Light Falloff controls until the image appears correct.
Image with Lens Correction
It doesn’t take much to make the correction, but given that every photograph shot with this lens will have the same light falloff and distortion, it would be great to have an easier way to fix it.
And there is. For your Canon DSLR (or any DSLR, actually), you can make a series of lens adjustments and save them as a user preset. In addition to Distortion and Light Falloff, you can correct Purple Fringing, Sharpness and Chromatic Aberration, and all these adjustments can be saved into a single preset.
Image with Capture One Lens Correction Preset
Once you’ve made the adjustments to one photograph, go to the presets icon at the top of the Lens Correction tab (second from the right). When you click it, a list of presets is displayed. At the top of this drop down menu is the option to Save User Preset… Click on this menu item and give your preset a name – I used ‘Canon24mmTSE’ for this lens so it’s easy to recognise. No point being too tricky with your names!
Now when I open a photo taken with my 24mm Canon TSE, I can simply click on the preset and my adjustments are made automatically. And, if I have taken an entire shoot with the one lens, I can apply my preset automatically to every image as I import the files into Capture One 6.
There really is a lot of power and automation built into Capture One 6 for the DSLR user.
This is a very good useful tips !
Hi Peter,
”You can also find some barrel or pin-cushion distortion (curvature) in most wide-angles, especially zoom wide-angle lenses…
For your Canon DSLR (or any DSLR, actually), you can make a series of lens adjustments..”
Yes, there are a number of handy features and presets for Canon and Nikon.
And No, this is not for any DSLR, actually.
What is missing is a general feature to correct moustache-distortion.
For example it is not possible to correct distortion for Sony Vario-Sonnar 2,8/24-70 ZA SSM.
This lens, made by Carl Zeiss, is an excellent zoom lens. As other lenses in this league it is rendering horizontal lines as a moustache, i.e. on short focal lengths the waterline in your take would curve slightly upwards in the center then down toward the edges – and then upwards again! The last move “upwards again” makes this type of distortion impossible to correct in C1.
Unfortunately C1 only offers presets for Hasselblad zoom lenses (which could suffer from the same type of distortion) plus fixed f.l. Carl Zeiss lenses for Contax.
For more than one year ago I urged CaptureOne to make a built-in preset for the Sony (Carls Zeiss) zoom lens mentioned above, but without any luck. It is very easy to get the impression that great FF cameras like Sony A900, including lenses wearing the Sony logo, are completely neglected by CaptureOne, which is disturbing.
But for a beginning, a general moustache-distortion correcting feature is most welcome.
Hope the professor is reading this too.
Hi Eigil,
Capture One comes with a number of built in lens correction presets for many (but not all) of the most popular lenses. If you own a lens that does not has a built in preset, you can still use Capture One’s Lens Correction Tab to correct the image and you can also create your own custom-made lens presets for a particular lens.
We are always working to improve Capture One and to support as many cameras and lenses as possible, and we appreciate and consider input from our customers when we evaluate which cameras and lenses should be supported. We are committed to delivering the absolute best image quality to our customers, but unfortunately we cannot include every camera or lens out there.
Your input on both the Sony lenses and the moustache-distortion correction feature has been passed on to our development team.
Best Regards
Hi Niels,
Thank you for passing my idea on. It’s an old idea, and I think it is well known in your development team. Thank you anyway.
In the meantime I am curious to see an example here, which – with the current tools available in C1 – is able to create a lens preset that will correct an image taken with a moustache distorting lens. I am willing to offer an example-tiff from the lens mentioned above.
In my opinion the built-in presets could very well be for excellent lenses with the same kind of moustache distortion as mine. And these presets could be due to the fact, that bending horizontal lines either down or upwards is not sufficient to correct moustache distortion. The tool must have the ability to do both movements combined. I have not been able to find the sweet spot with the current Lens correcting tool, so I am asking out of pure curiosity. What am I doing wrong?
I think this is a useful idea (to save preset corrections for specific lenses) but not for the specific lens you use in the test, the Canon 24mm TSE.
Since this is a tilt / shift lens any movements made with the lens (rise / fall / tilt) will cause different amounts of light fall off, fringing, chromatic aberration etc. depending on which part of the image circle is in use.
In some of mi 5D2 pics, C1 doesn’t recognise my lens (unsipported file archive) and doesn’t let me correct lens distorsion. Lightroom for instance lets you do it, no matter it recognised the lens or not.
I think it’s about time Capture One started to get it’s act together regarding lens corrections. Most other raw converters on the market today have built in compatibility with both DSLR cameras and specific lenses, I cannot see the sense in marketing a high-end convertor which claims to give the highest quality conversion which only supports a few medium format lenses for specific corrections (a legacy of early C1). There’s a huge gap between the accuracy and automation of DXO Optics Pro / Capture NX2 and others, and Capture One which merely suggest you fiddle with the sliders until the image looks right! I’m really happy with Express and love the way it works and looks, but I find myself hunting around now for a solution with Lens Corrections built in. I’m sorry Professor, in today’s market for convertors, Capture one is looking plain silly, and expensively so at that.
Lightroom has a huge amount of preset corrections for various lenses (correcting distortion as well as light fall off in one correction). I agree the list of lenses C1 corrects is VERY limited.
Some of the corrections Lightroom has for popular Canon zoom lenses (eg. 24-105 /4, a terrible lens) are amazing, and make a big difference.
C1 does produce great files, but it needs to keep up with the preset lens corrections as manually correcting the issues with zoom lenses (for example) is very time consuming.
Thanks Alan, yes I believe the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom (ACR) now have this feature built-in, but I am presuming Lens Correction needs to be done first in the conversion process in order to be the least detrimental to the image? This is something that’s rarely discussed, does pixel shifting on this scale degrade the image? It’s also noticeable how few images with straight lines (architectural) appear in the Professor’s Blog. Come on Phase One, send Peter Eastway (or me:) to New York armed with a DSLR and let’s see some real corrections!
Hi guys,
Thank you for your input – both for Capture One and for the content on the blog.
We are aware that Lens Corrections for specific lenses including Canon and Nikon lenses is something that many of our customers wish for in Capture One, and it is something that we are investigating.
If you are interested in reading more about lens corrections or architecture images, you can take a look at these couple of posts from the blog:
http://blog.phaseone.com/2011/03/24/chromatic-aberration/
http://blog.phaseone.com/2011/04/21/keystone-–-80-vs-100-correction/
http://blog.phaseone.com/2011/05/05/crop-outside-the-image/
All the best,
Niels
I like the original better.
Hey There Blog,
Speaking of which There is a terminology that a person must be acquainted with in the first place when confronted with Canon lenses. Canon has a few terms that are specific to itself.. Some other camera manufacturers have their own also. Canon and Nikon are the most desired camera makes. Lenses could be labeled as either prime or zoom lenses. Prime lenses contain a fixed focal length. Zoom lenses use a variable focal length. The caliber of photos you want as well as your budget determine the kinds of lenses you will purchase.
Regards
I found out that the slider for distortion correction is rather limited, e.g. I cannot have in between values like 1.5%, but only 1% or 2%. This is frustrating when at most times a more precise adjustment is required. Any thoughts?