Canon S90 and Distortion | theKitch

Canon S90 and Distortion

Published on November 30, 2009 in photography. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

All in the Family

I recently picked up a new Canon S90 point and shoot so I would have a nice little compact camera to carry around with me when I’m feeling too lazy to lug the 40D around. It’s been a real blast to play around with. One of the small drawbacks of the camera is that its fast and tiny lens does have a fair bit of inherent distortion. The camera fixes this itself almost entirely in the JPEGs. However if you shoot RAW you were stuck with using Canon DPP. A recent release candidate of Adobe’s DNG converter and Lightroom resolved this by adding distortion correction.

After all this we were left with only a tiny amount of distortion that Canon DPP was able to correct in addition to it’s base RAW conversion correction. This resulted in “perfect” shots with zero distortion. This was something we did not have the option of in Lightroom even with the release candidate. Until now…

PTLens has been updated for the S90. It has RAW and “standard” correction. If you are using LR 2.5 or DNG 5.5 release use the RAW option. If you are using the release candidates then use the standard correction. I’ll never have to use DPP again!

For the image below I used DNG 5.6 RC to convert the CR2 to DNG. Then I did all my editing in LR 3.0 Beta. Once completed I did an external TIFF edit in PTLens to do the final distortion correction. Thrilled with the results! The sign being dead straight made me quite happy.

Oh, did I mention that PTLens is only 25 bucks? It’s got support for nearly every camera and Lens you could imagine.

http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/

Note that I am not affiliated with PTLens in any way. I just think it’s awesome!

Little Boxes

6 Responses to “Canon S90 and Distortion”

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  • scottie
    December 1, 2009 at 8:12 am

    You should try and nab a Canon G7. It was very compact on my AK trip in my day pack and took some amazing shots.

    The AK gallery (you’ll have to weed thru some crap to see the cool wildlife in Denali at the end of the album)
    http://tinyurl.com/yk58z8x

  • kitch
    December 1, 2009 at 8:59 am

    The G-line of cameras are nice for sure. I like some of the shots you have out there.

    My girlfriend has a G9 and she definitely loves it. I couldn’t pass up the S90. It’s got the same sensor as the G11 and shoots very nice shots all the way to ISO 800. Extra bonus, f2.0 lens at 28mm at the wide end. Zooms to 105, but it is slow zoomed in, f4.9.

    Still, super happy with the camera. It’s TINY. Does everything I could ask from a point and shoot. Just can’t create the great depth of field that can be had with my 40D.

    http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=144&modelid=19210

  • Bob Bergey
    December 30, 2009 at 11:02 pm

    You just made my day! I use Aperture 2.1 to process my photos, usually shooting RAW with a Nikon D300. But I also keep a Canon S90 in my pocket for times the D300 is just too much camera. I bought the S90 partly because it could shoot RAW format, but as of now Aperture doesn’t support its RAW files yet (soon, I hope!). So learning here that I could use Adobe DNG converter, and PTLens to correct the lens distortion, solves my problems for now! And as a bonus, correcting perspective in PTLens appears easier and faster than editing in Photoshop after Aperture. Thank you!

  • John the Greek
    February 8, 2010 at 4:00 pm

    I am an S90 owner and Aperture user, and I find it frustrating that Apple doesn’t support the S90 (I am using it with my Nikons, so I wanted to use it with the S90 CR2 files too). So I decided to do something about it, so I came up with a sort-of preprocessing solution, which allows Mac OS-X to recognize the CR2 files the S90 produces and import them directly into Aperture.

    Here is what I came up with:

    http://forum.m1911.org/showthread.php?p=751668#post751668

    And of course, since you can now import the files into Aperture, you can use any Aperture plug-in to edit them, like PT-Lens.

    I hope you find it useful.

  • Julia Mason
    May 10, 2010 at 12:40 am

    i own several Canon L Lenses and they have the best quality. even better than Nikon..;*

  • jeffery patrick photography
    April 12, 2013 at 8:11 pm

    Pretty! This has been an incredibly wonderful post.
    Many thanks for providing this information.

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