Thread: Software-Corrected Barrel Distortion Revisted: Sony RX100

Amin, does Adobe Camera Raw also do the auto correction? I can open raw RX100 images without applying the Sony lens profile, but I do not see much corner difference between RAW and the in-camera JPG.

ETA: OK, I downloaded the Capture One Pro 7 trial version and did my own check. ACR (same engine as LR) does indeed add distortion correction, even when I do not select a lens profile from within Camera Raw. Thanks so much for the info--very helpful!

Hey, Amin It might be that the example image is deceiving me, but does the RX100 have complex distortion (partially optically corrected) or pure barrel distortion at wide angle?

Originally Posted by Luckypenguin

Hey, Amin It might be that the example image is deceiving me, but does the RX100 have complex distortion (partially optically corrected) or pure barrel distortion at wide angle?

I'll add my 2cents and say that most wide angle lens designs have quite a bit of edge aberration, usually coma or astigmatism. Plus, there is generally some rather severe vignetting. For lens design, the term "distortion" literally means a difference in magnification from the center to the edge, so is specific to barrel or pincushion effects.

What I noticed in the test images is that the chromatic aberration at the edge was made worse by the distortion correction. That seems counterproductive!

Ever so glad this thread is here. I was wondering why the corners of my shots are badly distorted and full of CA. particularly the bottom right hand corner.

I may have to resort to the Sony raw converter and convert to tiff before opening up in LR, and see if this makes a difference.

Any chance of a LR update to sort out? Lets hope.

Amin,

Thanks for taking the time to research/shoot/draft and post this. I fully agree with you, RAW files should be presented in their unaltered form to allow the photographer the options of what to lens imperfections correct and how much. Any professional editing software should facilitate this, unfortunately Adobe doesn't agree.

Thanks for the Capture One link - I'm off to the downloads!

- tdp

The beta version of Aftershot Pro I've been running (1.1.0.30), which has support for the RX100, has the ability to turn off lens correction. However, the RX100 lens is not calibrated in their database as yet. I spent the last two days scouring the net for lens correction parameters and found some that work quite nicely posted on pastebin. I had to modify the profile_sony.txt file but once I did they worked beautifully. Not sure how much they soften the edge of the image in comparison to LR4 but at least you can turn the feature off if you desire.

I saw the comparison of distortion correction comparing LR4 and Capture One and thought I would offer another.
DxO offers lens distortion correction for the RX100 and claims to do Lens Softness Correction progressively from the centre to the edges. I thought I would check it out.
Here's a comparison of Lightroom 4 on the left and DxO 8 on the right. DxO also does vignette correction which is why it's a bit brighter. No other alterations were made to the image.
It appears that the DxO image is sharper.

I forgot to mention in my previous post that the sample comparison was a 100% crop of the bottom left corner of the image.

Off topic on the RX100, but still on the distortion topic. The edges in the iPhone 5 camera have horrible distortion!!! Got that out of my chest!

Wow, the DxO is really nice--none of the corner "smear" that I see in ACR/LR! Thanks BJPhoto!