DIY lens profiles.

Adobe has not left Panasonic MFT camera users out in the cold when it comes to automation of corrections to remove distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting in Lightroom 3. They provide a fine tool to create your own lens profiles, for example when using non-Panasonic lenses on a G-digital body, like my newly acquired Olympus 9-18mm MFT. In my third column reviewing that outstanding optic, I stated:

Well, it turns out that Adobe provides a free application named Lens Profile Creator which allows you to create your own lens profiles for just about any lens on any camera, film or digital, from iPhone to Leica S2 or scanning 4×5 back on a field camera. The download includes not only the charts (you must print one so that you can photograph it) but also instructions for use of both the application and details of how to set up your camera and lighting.

With the G1 it’s only necessary to do this for non-Panasonic MFT lenses like the Olympus 9-18mm ultra-wide zoom. Panasonic lens’ distortions are corrected by the software in the G1/G2/G10/GH1/GF1 range of bodies. Here is what Adobe says of their application:

The PDF instruction guide for Lens Profile Creator can be found here and the instructions for printing the calibration charts are here.

Creation of a lens profile is easy. You take nine pictures of the chart – I used RAW as that is all I use – convert them to DNG format by importing to LR3 then exporting in DNG format, and then you load the nine DNG images into Lens Profile Creator to create the lens profile for a specific focal length. As chromatic and barrel distortion in the Olympus 9-18mm lens vary with focal length, I did this at the four marked focal lengths – 9, 11, 14 and 18mm – a total of 36 pictures. It doesn’t take but a few minutes to take the pictures (alignment, per Adobe, is not critical) and, on my nuclear powered Mac, Adobe Lens Profile Creator took some 2 minutes to generate each of the four profiles from the nine constituent pictures I took for each. For the criminally insane, you could generate multiple profiles for each focal length at varying apertures, (chromatic aberration varies with aperture) but I would rather be taking pictures. Please yourself. I focused (!) on creating profiles at disparate focal lengths as it’s barrel distortion that is the most sensitive variable for my use and it varies significantly with focal length.

Once done you place the profiles in the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0 directory on your Mac where they will be available to all users of that Mac. (There are also instructions for those poor, unfortunate Windows users who place little value on their time and have yet to get a life). Finally, the Adobe application allows you to submit the profile to Adobe’s user forum though for some bizarre reason the submitted profiles are only currently available for download to Photoshop CS5 users, not Lightroom 3 users. Hey! Adobe! Can you say ‘Duh!’?.

Here’s how your Lightroom 3 options will look if you named your profiles correctly:

The drop down focal length selection panel in LR3.

And here’s a ‘before’ (no profile) and ‘after’ (9mm profile) comparison of a profile being applied:

Henry Moore’s bollard. Before and after with the 9mm profile.

The profile file contains no fewer than 8 profiles, created at 9mm (f/4, f/5.6), 11mm (f/4.3, f/5.6), 14mm (f/4.9, f/7.1) and 18mm (f/5.6, f/11) at the apertures shown. Lightroom will automatically chose the profile nearest in focal length and aperture to your photograph’s EXIF data.

If you would like to download the profiles I created, for your own use, you can do so by clicking below. Please note that these are for use with RAW or DNG originals only. They will not appear if your file is in JPG or TIFF. Feel free to share them with anyone. Unzip the downloaded file then place the four individual profile files (not the enclosing folder) in the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0 directory. Next time you start LR3 they will be available. Please note that these are solely for the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens used on a Panasonic G-series digital body taking RAW images.

Click to download Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens profile for the Panasonic G-series body. For RAW and TIFF originals only.

So if you really must have automated corrections for that 65mm Super Angulon on your 1964 Linhof 4×5, Adobe Lens Profile Creator is the tool you need.

Indeed, I see no reason why this software tool should not be used to create profiles for your film and flat bed scanners – instead of photographing Adobe’s target, simply scan it and run the scans through the program, so now you can profile your scanner (or, heavens forbid, a darkroom enlarger) in much the same way you can profile your 21st century lens on the latest in digital bodies.

Alternative #1- DxO Optics Pro Elite:

DxO makes the fancifully named DxO Optics Pro Elite for correction of lens aberrations at the equally fancy price of $300. It’s bog slow even on my hyper-speed Mac, must be loaded separately from your regular processing application and at the price asked compares poorly with the free Adobe Lens Profile Creator. I reviewed it here. And there is no version for Snow Leopard. These people need a loud wake-up call.

Alternative #2 – PTLens:

I wrote in glowing terms of PTLens here. It’s a $15 app which can be used as either a stand-alone or as a PS or LR plugin, and has a large and constantly updated lens database. The latest version includes the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for both RAW and JPG on a Panny G body but I cannot recommend it. Simply stated, the RAW profile is awful, way overdoing the correction and turning barrel distortion into severe pincushion distortion instead. Further, as you have to round trip the file from LR that means that a TIFF file (lossless) is first generated, meaning that your 12mB RAW file will be 80gB by the time you save it back into LR. Not a big deal but with its current RAW profile I cannot recommend the product. My profiles, above, are way superior.

By way of illustration, here are the PTLens (left) and my custom profile (right) versions of an original which shows pronounced barrel distortion of the horizon. In the PTLens version a lot of the image is lost and the figure is way too elongated. If you could see the horizon which PTLens chops out you would see severe pincushion distortion, not to mention chopping out much of the ultra-wide effect you just paid good money for:

PTLens vs. my custom profile at 9mm

Here’s another example showing what a poor job PTLens does with this camera/lens combination – PTLens on the left cuts out lots of image information; my profile on the right does it correctly:

Moore’s bollard again – see above for the ‘as shot’ original. PTLens version on the left.

Alternative 3 – use LR3:

If you don’t mind having to manually correct distortions for every picture then manually adjusting for chromatic aberration, LR3’s controls are just fine when used with the Olympus 9-18mm. However, if your ultra-wide lens displays the ‘bow wave’ type of distortion where the barreling changes to pincushioning at different spots on the horizon then the built in LR3 control, which can correct plain spherical distortion only, is of no use and a tailored lens profile is the only option.

Conclusion:

“If you want a job done well, do it yourself” is one of the most asinine homespun philosophies in the Western world. If you want a job done well, delegate it to a professional and maximize your time value by applying your skill set to what you do best. This may just be an honorable exception to that dumb ‘rule’. If you want a good lens profile, do it yourself or if you use the Olympus 9-18 MFT on a G-body, use mine.

Martin Evening scores again.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about Martin Evening’s outstanding Lightroom 2 reference book and the Lightroom 3 version is now available.

Best of all, you can get it in a Kindle eBook version which will play on up to five devices – I have mine on the iPad and on my desktop Mac.

What distinguishes Evening’s writing is not only clarity and practical experience, he is also a very good photographer. Too often these so called software experts turn out to be truly awful photographers which makes you wonder what you could possibly learn from them. It’s still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, last I checked. The beauty of an eBook is that you can look up the index then just touch the page to jump to it; it’s also weightless, not something that can be said of the 600 page paperback predecessor, which I refer to constantly. Further, you can bookmark as many locations as you like as well as change the font sizes to suit your eyesight. The Table of Contents is instantly available if you touch the bookmark logo at the base of the screen.

Bookmarking in the Kindle edition on the iPad.

Finally, the Kindle version meets with my goal of getting rid of every last physical book in my home, freeing the wall space covered with bookshelves for better use – like displaying photographs.

I use mine on the iPad where it works really well, as both my big Dell monitors are full when using Lightroom, making the desktop Mac unavailable unless I want to switch apps. You can also read the book on a Kindle but without color it’s not the same. It is very handy to peruse on the iPad in idle moments – rare is the occasion when I do not learn something new. And thanks to Kindle’s sync technology, the page you left at on the iPad will be the page the book opens at on the Mac, and so on.

There’s a good reason to buy the latest version – the new features of LR3 offer substantial processing enhancements and it really helps to have a working photographer show how to get the last ounce out of these.

I continue to learn daily about Lightroom – yesterday, for example, I did my first split toning effort. I never did understand what those sliders were for until I checked Martin Evening’s book.

Hut. Split toning – my first attempt! G1, 9-18mm Olympus @ 9mm, ISO 320

Update as of July 30, 2010: Amazon just released an updated version of the Kindle app which allows free text search! Want to look for ‘noise’? Just touch the magnifying glass, type the word and there you are. Wonderful!

Some of Evening’s insights are tremendous. Take this one on film of days past:

Any old timer worth his salt knows well that if you agitated your film less when it was in developer that you would increase sharpness, owing to the exact effect he describes. It was a pre-digital age ‘sharpening’ process, albeit with near-zero control! The book is full of this sort of thing though rarely as quirky as this.

A useful addition.

One of the new features in LR3 is a set of sliders to add and manipulate the traditional effect of grain from film days of yore.

Here’s a straight, unprocessed snap:

Plane, graves and flowers. 5D, 1/350, f/11, 24-105mm at 24mm.

Here’s an enlarged section of the above – note the grain sliders at lower right:

And here it is with the grain sliders adjusted to emulate high speed color film grain – I have to use enlargements to show grain owing to the grain free nature of the 5D’s sensor:

The Roughness setting, here at 38, is a nice compromise. Too small and the effect is too artificial. Too high and it’s overdone. Much the same goes for the Size slider, which I prefer to keep low.

It’s a useful tool, especially if you hit one of those Sarah Moon faux impressionism periods.

To reset to default adjustments simply double click the ‘Amount’ slider.

Some outstanding improvements.

Lightroom 3 has exited the Beta test stage and is now available as a $99 upgrade to Lightroom 2 users. I tried the Beta version but when it choked converting my previews to the new version after an hour of grinding away I decided someone else could do the testing and spent my valuable time elsewhere. Clearly something was wrong as my catalog contains a modest 6,000 pictures. Well, the final version appears to have fixed the issue because after download, a meaty 75 gB, I fired it up and it converted the 1:1 preview files in 3 minutes.

Technical background:

The LR3 preview file is given the 2-2 name by default; change it at will.

The catalog of pictures is not changed in any way.

The hardware I am running this on is my HackPro with OS Snow Leopard 10.6.3, 2.83gHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 8gB of 800 mHz DDR2 RAM and an Nvidia 9800GTX+ video card driving two Dell 2209 21.5″ monitors, so it’s a very fast setup, designed for photo processing. CPU and memory use is modest and I would guess that 4gB would be just fine – Lightroom has always been good in this regard, unlike Aperture.

CPU use for all four cores. I show the effect of paging through several full screen previews here.

Memory use with LR3, NetNewsWire, Mail, iStumbler and SpamSieve running

LR3 runs natively in 64-bit mode.

LR3 allows you to change to what Adobe calls the ‘2010 Process’ for your pictures; I avoided this in light of the warning, below, but LR3 will adopt this process for all future imports, which is fine with me. I don’t want to have to reprocess a lot of older snaps which I am happy with:

LR3 ‘2010 Process’ warning.

Click the ‘!’ logo on any picture in the Develop module and you get this message, meaning you can selectively update to the new process:

Perspective correction:

One of the biggest surprises for me is that LR3 has added perspective correction; I don’t recall seeing that in LR3 Beta. The application can automatically sense the lens used for a limited range of camera manufacturers:

Only a few cameras are supported

Loading up a Canon Fisheye snap from the 5D I see this:

Hearst Castle pool drained for maintenance. 5D. 15mm Fisheye.

Click the ‘Enable Perspective Correction’ box and you immediately get a perfectly corrected picture:

Hearst Castle pool straightened out.

You can make horizontal and vertical corrections but the ‘distort’ feature available in Photoshop is missing. Still, this adds a key tool to the LR application which removes one of the last few uses I have for Photoshop. In LR3 it is fast and perfectly implemented, right down to the remasking of the image to fill the frame after correction.

What if your camera is not listed? Simply click on ‘Manual’ and have at it – an approach which allows both lens distortion correction and correction of leaning verticals.

Here’s an uncorrected image from my Panasonic LX1 with leaning verticals (and leaning everything else owing to earthquake damage!):

Here it is after messing with the slider:

Next you use the Resize slider to fill the frame:

Then hit Enter and you are done:

Until now I have been using the excellent PTLens and round tripping images from LR2. Unless your lens cannot be corrected in LR3, PTLens seems obsolete, though it does boast a huge lens database so is worth keeping, just in case.

If you want to add an unlisted lens to Lightroom 3 rather than using the manual method, simply download Adobe Lens Profile Creator and follow the instructions.

LR3 does not include the useful ‘Distort’ function for dramatic corrections, so it still means round-tripping to Photoshop if that is needed, which is rarely in my case.

Tethered shooting:

I have addressed tethered shooting here on occasion and, frankly, it has been a pain to get it working correctly, what with the need to set up capture folders, tune LR2 just so, etc. That is all in the past. Tethered shooting is now beautifully integrated into LR3 and the following cameras are supported:

I plugged in my Canon 5D to a USB port on one of my Dell monitors and set up LR3 for tethered shooting thus, after which I named the capture folder:

LR3 displays the tethered shooting menu thus:

The big button on the right (it really should be colored red) is the shutter release, or you can use the one on the camera.

Snap, and the picture appears in LR3:

Click on ‘Develop Settings’ and you get the usual choice, together with any you may have saved:

This is a plug-and-play implementation, perfectly executed. Bravo Adobe! The sort of thing you expect from Apple ….

P.S. Adobe – you need to make your LR3 demo videos run on the iPad – face reality and get with the program.

There are lots of other improvements in LR3, including movie processing (not for me), allegedly better noise reduction (not needed with the Canon 5D or Panasonic G1 which are my daily snappers), but the two detailed above alone make the $99 upgrade worthwhile for this photographer. Speed has not been compromised, the interface remains as nice as can be and the improvements need no instruction book to learn.

Recommended. I just paid Adobe for mine!