You can get perspective correction, or ‘shift’ lenses, but perspective correction is easier to carry out in software these days. You use it to correct converging verticals, or ‘keystoning’, in photographs of tall buildings where you’ve had to tip the camera upwards, but you can also correct horizontal convergence or both at the same time – for example if you are photographing flat artwork and you can’t shoot from a perfectly perpendicular position.
I’m talking about the one thing that it’s very difficult to avoid when taking pictures in any urban environment, and that’s tilting the camera. Even the smallest tilt can make the most careful architectural study look like a snapshot. It’s the tiniest of details but one of the most important, in my opinion, for this kind of photography.
Verdict: 3.5 stars DxO ViewPoint 5 is a specialised distortion and correction tool which has some clever features but is a bit of an awkward fit with most editing workflows, partly because it can’t open and correct RAW files and partly because most applications you might launch it from have distortion and perspective correction tools of their own.
Perspective correction is not necessary for most photos, but there are times when it will make the difference between an image that looks professional and one that just looks amateurish.
Lightroom comes in two versions. Lightroom Classic CC, the ‘desktop’ version, is probably the most popular, especially amongst long-term Lightroom users, but Lightroom CC has a lot to commend it. On the downside, it means paying extra for Adobe Creative Cloud storage – the 20GB with the regular Photography Plan is not enough, and the…
Here’s an interesting little problem you often get when photographing paintings or other pictures. You get the camera perfectly perpendicular to the picture, only to find you’ve got horrible glare from the surface of the picture, completely ruining the shot. So here’s the problem. I didn’t have a polarising filter with me, which might have…