Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Last week I was loading programs onto my new PC and was reminded of a useful and inexpensive program called PTLens by epaperpress.com/ptlens  The program is capable of lens barrel distortion and fisheye correction, perspective correction and chromatic aberration correction.
An excellent feature of the program is the large database of cameras and lenses for barrel distortion correction which can be picked up from the image exif data or, if that is not complete, by entering the lens type manually .
The other great feature for Qimage users is that an external editor can be specified in PTLens so that a new corrected image, with a file name suffix of _pt, is opened there.
It is a colour management aware program and embedded profiles are retained in newly created images.
The basic work-flow with Qimage (Q-SE and Q-U) set as the external editor in PTL is as follows:

1.   Convert a raw image to tif or jpeg. (or use camera jpeg directly)
2.   Open PTLens, locate the image directory and file.
3.   Set the camera & lens data if required.
4.   Make your corrections and click Done.
5.   Open Qimage, or if already open with the correct folder, refresh thumbs.
6.   Crop image to remove angled black edges resulting from the perspective correction.

I have no commercial interest in the program but thought that some Qimage users would like to know about it.
Terry

Just had a quick look at sample images.  interesting.

I will be giving it a trial later.

Thanks for bringing it to attention.

Jeff

Jeff!
Terry takes crooked pictures so I understand why he needs that, but yours are usually straight!  :-D

Fred

I've used PTLens for several years on literally thousands of real estate photos, but as a Photoshop plug-in.  Admittedly I do all my editing in Photoshop and don't have a Qimage workflow to fit PTLens into.  It's more than doubled in price since I bought it, to an outrageous $25 USD!

Good God :)  That's £15 in real money, don't forget we have to bail out Ireland.

Jeff

Always in the forefront of my mind...

Just given PTLens a run.

Seems to do a good job on converging verticals.

File naming caused me a bit of confusion

_pt.tiff in PTLens is very distorted but in Qu verticals are correct.

Not tried barrel distortion, anyway I don't have fisheyes  - well only when cracking a barrel of port, then they are crossed:)

Will probably be raiding the Irish Bank.

jeff





  

Unfortunately PTLens can't do anything for beer goggles either.