Can a shift or tilt-shift lens fix converging verticals in building photos?
Asked 7/22/2010
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I shoot with a Nikon D300 and a 17–55mm lens. When I photograph tall buildings from street level and have to point the camera upward, the buildings appear to lean inward. Is this best corrected in post-processing, or is a shift/tilt-shift lens the right solution? If a special lens is needed, do I specifically need tilt, or only shift?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
16y ago
2 Answers
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A tilt-shift lens is indeed the best way to correct this effect in-camera, but even then, it can look odd if the distortion is quite high. The example you have given should be OK. If you want to do it in post-processing, Lightroom 3 now has built-in perspective correction tools. When you use them, a grid overlays the photo which is updated live, so you can spot when the verticals become parallel. With a high-enough resolution image, this should produce results almost as good as with a T/S lens, for a lot less money.
Originally by user456. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user456
16y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes—this is the classic converging verticals effect caused by tilting the camera upward. A shift lens is the optical solution; you don’t need tilt for this particular problem. Shift lets you keep the camera level so vertical lines stay parallel while still framing the top of the building.
You can also correct it in post-processing. Perspective correction tools in software such as Lightroom can do a good job, especially if your original file has enough resolution. The tradeoff is that correcting perspective stretches and crops the image, so you lose some pixels compared with doing it optically.
A practical no-special-gear approach is to use a wider lens, keep the camera level, place the building higher in the frame, and crop later. That mimics what a shift lens does, but wastes part of the frame.
So: if you shoot architecture often and want the best in-camera result, a shift or tilt-shift lens is the right tool. If this is occasional, post-processing or shooting wider and cropping may be good enough.
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