How can I straighten a curved shoreline from an ultra-wide lens shot?

Asked 1/30/2019

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I shot a landscape on a Nikon D610 with a Sigma 12-24mm ultra-wide lens, and the lake shoreline appears curved in the image. I’d like to straighten it in software without losing more sharpness than necessary. What software or workflow is best for correcting this kind of wide-angle distortion?

nikon landscape wide-angle lens-correction raw-processing

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

7y ago

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I have not used the latest version, but DxO makes a database of a combination of body and lenses to correct some problems, like chromatic aberration, etc.

They also have a program to correct wide angle lenses deformations: https://www.dxo.com/dxo-viewpoint/

It has a 30-day trial.

Here is another program. A plug in for Photoshop.

http://richardrosenman.com/shop/lens-corrector-pro/

You can also use Photoshop.

Paint shop pro has some basic corrections too.

Affinity Photo has some automatic lens corrections.

And you also have Hugin (This program does so many things)

But yes, you will sacrifice some of the image data. With extreme corrections, you need to crop the image, all the stuff that does not fit in the new rectangle.

In the specific case of your image, you will be fine.

Originally by user37321. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user37321

7y ago

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Ultra-wide lenses can make shorelines look curved, and correcting that is possible, but some trade-offs are unavoidable. Any geometric correction involves resampling the image, so you may lose a small amount of sharpness and usually need to crop the frame after correction.

Best practice is to start from the RAW file and do all geometric corrections in one step to avoid repeated quality loss. Lens-profile-based tools can help with general distortion correction, though a shoreline may still need manual adjustment for the look you want.

Software mentioned by users includes DxO ViewPoint, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, PaintShop Pro, Hugin, and the Lens Corrector Pro Photoshop plug-in. DxO and some RAW editors can apply camera/lens profile corrections automatically; Photoshop and similar editors can handle more manual straightening.

So: use a RAW-based workflow, apply lens correction first, then manually refine if needed, and expect a slight sharpness loss plus some cropping with stronger corrections.

How can I straighten a curved shoreline from an ultra-wide lens shot?

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