Can lens distortion and chromatic aberration be corrected for reversed or stacked lenses?
Asked 3/9/2016
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I’m shooting macro using both a reversed lens and stacked lenses. In post-processing, can software like Photoshop reliably correct distortion and chromatic aberration for these non-standard setups? If a lens is reversed, should corrections be applied as the inverse of the lens’s normal profile? Are there lens-profile libraries for reversed or stacked combinations, and can these setups be fully corrected in the end?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
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In short, no to all questions.
Aside from manufacturer-provided utilities (in-camera or otherwise), there is no magic formula for correcting lens abberations in post, nor is there a straightforward way to do this in Photoshop aside from the Lens Correction filter, which has its limitations. Any non-standard lens mounting such as reversing mean that any 'auto' correction tools won't work, so you're left with anything you can pull off in Photoshop.
Why?
The abberations involved are not limited to just barrel/pincushion distortion which are basically all that Photoshop (and other apps') built in 'lens correction' filters can correct.
The notion that mounting identical lenses face to face with a reversing ring unfortunately doesn't mean that they correct each other's abberations, as nice as this would be if it were true. This is due to (practically) irreversible physical effects like diffraction and refraction.
Reversing a lens doesn't also reverse the distortion characteristics, it just changes it in unpredictable ways. Camera lenses are not designed to be reversed, so results will vary widely from lens to lens. However, you can generally expect wide lenses to exhibit more field curvature and spherachromatism than normal lenses when reversed (this is not the same thing as barrel/pincushion distortion though), but beyond that there's no golden rule regarding lens performance when reversed.
Originally by user38928. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user38928
10y ago
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Usually, no. Automatic lens-profile correction is designed for normal lens mounting, so it generally won’t work for reversed lenses or stacked combinations.
Photoshop-style lens correction can help with simple distortion, but these setups introduce more complex aberrations than standard barrel/pincushion correction can handle. Reversing a lens does not mean you can just apply the normal profile in reverse, and there generally aren’t ready-made profile libraries for reversed or stacked lens pairs.
If two identical lenses are stacked back-to-back at the same settings, some aberrations may partially cancel, but that’s not something you can count on. With different lenses, correction would need to be worked out manually.
The practical approach is to calibrate the setup yourself: photograph a grid, adjust distortion/chromatic aberration manually, and apply those settings to images shot with the exact same configuration. In macro work, aberrations can change quickly with focus distance, so calibration only matches well if focus and setup remain fixed.
So: no reliable auto-correction, no simple inverse profile, and only limited manual correction is realistically possible.
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