Canon S90 | theKitch

I have decided to do a 52 weeks project this year (one photo each week for a year) and it’s been fairly enjoyable thus far. I had given brief consideration to a 365 (photo a day for a year) but quickly dismissed it for fear of it becoming an absolute bear. I enjoy photography, but it has its limits. Setting myself up for failure is something I strive to avoid.

There are a lot of approaches to this little project. Many people choose to do self portraits, some choose to do landscapes, a number of people choose an object to focus on. I’ve gone with the latter as you can see. Batman and The Joker are now on the loose!

You can watch my progress at my 2010 52 Weeks Set. I would also recommend checking out the Triangle 52 group and the Plastic 52 group.

I have more concepts for photography in 2010 as well. Hopefully I can execute and you will see more of that here in the future.

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!