This may be a dumb question but...

[dEARlEADER]

Why don't the camera companies add automatic compensation for barrel/pincoushin/fallout in their firmware?? At least for their own lenses....

 

[Garbz]

Because to do so would mean cropping bits out of the side of the frame so your 18mm lens no longer has the effective field of view of 18mm.

Also because any image editing is destructive and pretty much most photographers want their camera to do as little as possible to the images. It's just good marketing really. Mum's and dad's may want this feature, but then are likely not to care. I think professionals would prefer to keep full control of their output. I rarely correct the distortion on my images unless I'm doing some architectural imaging where it is critical that there is no barrel distortion.

 

[dEARlEADER]

thanks...

I was under the impression that pro's usually correct things like barrel automatically in photoshop.... (or use billion dollar lenses that don't show distortion in the first place)

 

[Mav]

As processing power and battery life improve, I'm sure they'll have that option in the cameras eventually. Newer cameras like the D300 and D3 are already correcting lens color fringing issues right in the camera which nobody wants. Sometimes you do actually want the distortion in the photo though so I wouldn't want mandatory distortion correction, but yes the option to do that on the camera would be nice.

 

[brileyphotog]

Every lens is an individual, so I don't think you could make a blanket correction program. And as Mav pointed out, sometimes you want the distortion.

 

[Big Mike]

Every lens is an individual, so I don't think you could make a blanket correction program.

Check out DxO Optics Pro. It's an editing program that can automatically correct for distortion etc. They profile most lenses and you use the specific profiles for the lenses that you have. So yes, every lens is different but this software takes that into account.

 

[dEARlEADER]

well thats kinda what i mean.... Nikon has a handful of lenses and correction algorithms should be softwared on the cameras cpu....

as a hobbyist... i don't really mind the effect of barrel or pincushion.... just asked because i was curious.... my D60 does tons crap that i would exchange for lens correction.... most prosumer lens review complaints are about the degree of barrel/pincushion/vignetting etc.. if they fixed it.. the only complaints would be sharpness, build quality, and f-stop limitations... they would knock off 3 of 6 complaints... without having to redesign the lens...

 

[Mav]

Every lens is an individual, so I don't think you could make a blanket correction program. And as Mav pointed out, sometimes you want the distortion.

DxO already does it, as Mike pointed out. I have it and it works great. It's truly a rare occasion when their default correction goes awry. When it does, it's just a slider bar adjustment. The only thing I've ever had be off is my 18-135DX. It tends to get oversharpened by DxO in the 105-135mm range at f/8 or smaller, and I've also noticed that this thing is fantastically sharp there, probably a bit better than the norm. No problem. I can just go back and reprocess and set the DxO Sharpening from 0 to -1 (range is -2 to +2), or do that ahead of time if I notice it in advance. It's dead-on with all of my other lenses, and I've hardly ever heard of any complaints about the program aside from interface and crashing related stuff.

I'm unsure how DxO makes their calibration modules, but I suspect they're using at least 3 and possibly up to 5 samples of lenses, and then making a composite correction average for the combined sample which is what would go into their modules. I doubt they're just testing one random sample of a lens. Scientifically and statistically that's just not how you'd want to do things, and if that's what they were doing then their software wouldn't be nearly as accurate and consistent as it is. They probably have NDAs signed with the manufacturers so that they can get production spec lenses ahead of the general public so that their correction modules are available soon afterwards.