although I'm a landscape photographer I do like to take pictures of the things
including architecture I'm not very good at it and to be honest a lot of the
things I shoot tend to be grab shots as on passing something
this example is case in point I shot it in San Francisco probably about five or
six years ago now and I captured it with an infrared camera which is why you're
seeing the funny colors on screen at the moment and this example has been already
converted using DxO into a tiff file now I'm not in DxO at the moment I'm
actually in Lightroom and the reason for this is that I'd started playing about
with something called DxO viewpoint which tries to correct architectural
problems like converging verticals it is a very good piece of software but I
thought what does Lightroom actually offer me because I know there are some
things in the transform panel which will help you actually correct some
perspective problems so I thought well let's experiment and see what we can do
now if you look at this image it's typical of a grab shot initially on
first appearance it looks okay but if you look at the verticals they're
converging and another problem what's this center part for the building
appears to be central it's not really because if you count the number of
windows we've got one two three on this side and one two three four on that side
so although I may have it in the center of the frame I've not got the camera
turned directly Square onto the building and so because of that I'm seeing more
of one side than I am of the other now I'm never going to be able to correct
something so severe in just software but let's see it just what is possible with
this now the first thing I want to say is that there's two areas that often get
confused in Lightroom which is lens Corrections
and Transform. lens Corrections are just trying to take out the distortion that
your lens creates or things like pin cushioning and barreling if you go to
the manual section you can see using the distortion what that does now I'm just
going to reset that because I've already taken out the lens distortion using DxO
and the reason I did this in DxO is that the lens profiles in there to my mind
are actually a lot more powerful than the ones in Lightroom and they seem to
make a much better job of correcting this with this particular lens Lightroom
still leaves a bit of barrel distortion whereas DxO is eradicated it
now what I'm going to do is use this transform tool which is further down and
I'm gonna use this to square up the building and try and remove the
converging verticals I could use the auto option but it's being a little bit
lazy and you'll never get quite as good a result as if you do this manually the
tool I'm going to use in here is this guided version now as soon as I click
guided this little tool here becomes enabled you can click it to pick it up
and you can also click it again to put it down what this allows me to do when
it's enabled is I can pick a section of the building and click on it
so as I'm moving my cursor around you should be able to see that there's a
square magnified section of the image so I'll put my first point there and I'll
drag down to another point in line with it or which should be in line now the
line I've just drawn should actually be vertical because all the windows aligned
in this building and now I'm gonna do the same on the other side so again I'll
just click once to put my mark in and then I'll drag down and position it now
once I've added two of these lines Lightroom is already taken care of
removing the converging verticals next thing I want to do is actually line up
some of these windows so I'm going to pick first off a window over on this
side again I'll pick him to the corner and I'm gonna line that up with the
corresponding window on this side and now I'm gonna do the same with another
window here and that should go into the window here which is slightly out of
frame what I've been able to do there is actually square up the building quite
well but it's still not quite right let's go and drop the tool down and now
although we square we can actually make further adjustments using these options
here now one of the things when we actually added the Corrections was that
the image gets distorted and we can change that again by using this aspect
ratio here and that allows us to see more of the image at the top and also at
the bottom once you've done that you can actually move the image around within
the frame that really is on the right side of the image about as far as I can
go but on the left side I could go further one of the things we can do now
is we can actually rotate the image a bit further and know what we're seeing
is that the image rather than having four windows on this side has now got
three although it's still not quite perfect I'm also starting to see the
edge of the frame coming in here now I could use this constrain crop option but
I'm not going to instead I'm going to maneuver the image around a little bit
further and gain I'm gonna reach for my guides here and you can already see how
these have started to be moved out of shape what I'm going to do is now pick
new points on here and move them around again and as I do that the building
starts to square up again
and again I can change the aspect ratio and I can also move the offset and I can
move the vertical offset as well and I can scale further now let's try and move
these around a little bit further so we'll leave that one there and we'll
pick this option here and although the image doesn't square up perfectly yet
it's actually improving it every time and now I'm starting to get some of the
image more or less lined up it's not perfect yet but it's no looking a lot
better than it was I'll just improve the scale again
and although the image isn't perfectly in the middle yet we're actually
starting to see three windows in roughly a symmetrical shape on the image and we
can distort that a little bit further to improve things and now although we
haven't got a perfectly square image we're actually seeing a lot better
result so this is rather a bit of an iterative process here but ultimately
you can actually achieve an awful lot now if I compare this to the viewpoint
software that I've been using actually it's almost as powerful and in some ways
it's possibly even more powerful because it seems to give a lot more freedom when
I come to actually adjust the images and certainly by moving around on the image
you can actually create some rather weird and wacky distortions but overall
you can achieve a good symmetrical image although as I said at the beginning I'm
never going to be able to correct something that says completely skewed as
this building but it created more symmetry when was there in the initial
image and it's certainly a lot better so if I just show you the previous image on
this will reset it and we undo that now and you can see the difference as a
substantial difference there between what we had in the beginning and what we
had at the end again you can see that so overall I'm probably not going to
upgrade to the viewpoint software from DxO a rather expensive compared to the
tools I've already got available in Lightroom I hope you found that useful
I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft
I'll see you next time for another video