All lenses have their little quirks, but anyone importing and processing huge stacks of shots at any one time will know what a pain it is to manually correct these troublesome traits.
Adobe Lightroom goes some way to trim down the editing process with its invaluable Sync feature. However, for lens aberrations such as geometric distortion, chromatic aberration (purple fringing) and vignetting tweaks can be painstakingly laborious.
Available now as a pre-release Adobe's Lens Profile Creator gives photographers the power to bulk correct lens distortions in images captured by a particular lens.
Setting up a profile using Adobe Lens Profile Creator should be simple enough. After taking a number of sample checkerboard images with your chosen lens it's a case of converting the set of raw files into the DNG file format using Adobe Camera Raw processor. These DNG images are then imported into the Lens Profile Creator to generate custom lens profiles. It’s also possible to import JPEGs or TIFFs if you want to create lens profiles for a non-raw workflow.
It’s good to see Adobe will be offering a collection of checkerboard PDF files along with the application, so users have the option to home print their calibration charts. Plus, if none of the existing checkboard PDF files are suitable for your particular lens there’s also scope to edit existing charts manually.
Once you’ve created profiles for dedicated lenses they sit in the specific lens profile folders on your local hard-drive. Alternatively, it’s also possible to share or collect profiles from the Adobe Lens Profile Creator community.
The Lens Profile Creator is compatible with both Windows and Mac OSX systems and suitable for use in the Photoshop family of Adobe products. Once the utility is downloaded it will work alongside Photoshop, Camera Raw and Photoshop Lightroom.
Of course, as it’s just a pre-release at the moment, Adobe is offering the Lens Profile Creator for testing purposes rather than promising every lens hiccup will be resolved. However, it seems pretty confident the utility will yield practical results.
The Adobe Lens Profile Creator is available to download for free at Adobe Labs.
