Adobe Lens Profile Creator

[ptarmigan]

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Anyone using/used this?

 

If so how good is it and is it any better than doing so manually?

[udaniel]

I'll let you know the next days, I just downloaded it and will undergo the lengthy procedure tomorrow (taking 36 shots of a checkerboard with my V-Lux to cover the zoom range)

 

It'll be interesting to compare it to PT Lens which works great but is not working on the DNG or RAW but on TIFF, which makes it tedious to use when having lots of shots. A integration in LR would speed up the process significantly

 

Question: What do you mean by "manual"? You sure can do some de-vignetting and hor/vert corrections, but cromatic and barrel distortion is not easy to do if you don't have straight lines and black/white patches on your picture, isn't it?

 

Cheers, Uwe

[ptarmigan]

I'll let you know the next days, I just downloaded it and will undergo the lengthy procedure tomorrow (taking 36 shots of a checkerboard with my V-Lux to cover the zoom range)

 

It'll be interesting to compare it to PT Lens which works great but is not working on the DNG or RAW but on TIFF, which makes it tedious to use when having lots of shots. A integration in LR would speed up the process significantly

 

Question: What do you mean by "manual"? You sure can do some de-vignetting and hor/vert corrections, but cromatic and barrel distortion is not easy to do if you don't have straight lines and black/white patches on your picture, isn't it?

 

Cheers, Uwe

 

LR3 gives you Profile (automatic/semi) and Manual options. With little or no Exif data relating to the lens when shooting with an M8, and no LR3 profiles for Leica lenses anyway, you are faced with manually dialling in transform selections unless you create your own profiles.

 

I too downloaded the app but as yet have had no time to look at it. Looks like a lengthy process. Good job I have only 2 lenses then!

[udaniel]

well well, I spent some hours today to take the shots and to get Lens Profile Creator do the calculations - I had to shoot some again, because it seems that the software does not like too similar pictures. It seems that it is a good idea to position the camera not always in the normal axis (by moving the camera on the tripod so that each take is well positioned to the plane) but to take the shots for the left and right part of the covered area with an angle of 20-30 degrees for wide angle lenses and some 10 degrees for normal/light tele.

 

having done that I finally created my profile, stored it at all possible places where LR3, PS4, ACR would look for them - it isn't recognised/shown in the dropdown of LR3

 

I'll search the forums the next days for an answer, but at the moment I can only report that the tool creates a profile (but plan some hours), not how good it is

 

stay tuned

[01af]

Did you notice that Adobe Lens Profile Creator prerelease 2 is available for download at Adobe Labs? It got a few bugs fixed ...

[sanyasi]

I used the Canon Mark II, 5D this weekend, which meant there was a lens profile available and pre-loaded in LR3. I must admit, I take a "It's magic" approach to this and I assume that Canon or someone close to the company built the profiles, but the results were noticeable--each photo was slightly darkened and slightly magnified--at least that is how I perceived the correction. The photos in question were musicians performing, done as portraits or close-ups on individuals.

[ptarmigan]

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I used the Canon Mark II, 5D this weekend, which meant there was a lens profile available and pre-loaded in LR3. I must admit, I take a "It's magic" approach to this and I assume that Canon or someone close to the company built the profiles, but the results were noticeable--each photo was slightly darkened and slightly magnified--at least that is how I perceived the correction. The photos in question were musicians performing, done as portraits or close-ups on individuals.

 

Yes, but the whole point is that there are no profiles for Leica lenses

 

When I get some spare time I'll have a go at this for myself. I'm surprised no one seems to have used this tough.

[udaniel]

yes, I used the new version right after it was published

 

with some help from the Adobe Lens Profile Creator forum I finally got it going ... in a nutshell there are some bugs in ALPC which will impact only a few users, but did in my case:

1st: ALPC has problems with non-English WinXP versions, because some characters translate wrongly in the profile, which is a text file (i.e. "." in the textual description of either lens or camera gets translated into "," and the auto-detect of the profile doesn't work

2nd: A bridge camera with a fixed objective like the V-LUX 1 does actually not provide lens data in the EXIF file, hence ALPC does not write corresponding lines in the profile - but LR3 needs these lines to detect the profile!

 

After fiddling some hours by comparing a working profile with the one I created I finally got it going. The results look pretty good regarding vignetting and barrel distortion, I didn't have enough time left to check chromatic aberration yet.

Next weekend I'll take some time to compare against PT Lens and let you know the results. If it works, it's definitely a big improvement in the workflow as it works in less than a second without leaving Lightroom. Those who use PT Lens know that you have to invoke it as an external program and the changes are applied to a newly created tiff file, it works fine, but takes time and creates a new version of the photo, which is against the philosophy of LR for fast processing and leaving the original dng/raw file unchanged in the background unless you print or switch to Photoshop etc.

 

Cheers, Uwe

[udaniel]

Yes, but the whole point is that there are no profiles for Leica lenses

 

When I get some spare time I'll have a go at this for myself. I'm surprised no one seems to have used this tough.

 

You're right, I found a M8 camera profile, but no lens profiles yet. But the Adobe guys told me that they are working on opening the online database which now is only accessible to CS5 users (!) to LR3. I'm pretty sure that there are Leica lens profiles available, but I'm using CS4 and have no plans to spend some hundred Euros to switch to CS5 just to have access to the archive (created by users who send the profiles to Adobe and giving up all rights to Adobe ).

 

If there is a CS5 user reading this: Please check the database, you can store every profile found there locally and then post it to us ever grateful users of the L.Camera Forum ;-)))

 

Cheers, Uwe

[photolandscape]

Just wondered whether anyone out there has come up with a profile for the 35mm Summarit 2.5 on the M9? My only problem with it is barrel distortion, and if I could come up with a workable correction that would be great. Too bad Adobe only bothered to introduce a handful of big-time camera brand correction profiles--Nikon, Canon, and a couple of others, in CS5.

[photolandscape]

One other thing--I use a Zeiss 25mm. Aside from the red-fringing, which is quite ugly and bothersome, it's great. I currently use Sandy's Cornerfix software to correct, but could his program be integrated right into CS5 or Bridge so that I could batch process dozens of photographs shot with this lens on my M9, rather than having to fool around with them individual unless I needed/wanted to?

[sandymc]

One other thing--I use a Zeiss 25mm. Aside from the red-fringing, which is quite ugly and bothersome, it's great. I currently use Sandy's Cornerfix software to correct, but could his program be integrated right into CS5 or Bridge so that I could batch process dozens of photographs shot with this lens on my M9, rather than having to fool around with them individual unless I needed/wanted to?

 

I have asked Adobe to build the necessary "hooks" into LR. So far they have not

 

Sandy

[udaniel]

Anyone using/used this?

 

If so how good is it and is it any better than doing so manually?

 

Now I had the time to do a complete profile with different exposure, focal lengths ando distances. I used both LR3 with the created profile and PT Lens, printed a test photo on my Epson 3880 in A3+ and compared ....

 

My conclusion: LR3 works great, the barrel distortion is better corrected, the chromatic aberration is perfectly corrected without manual help and the vignetting is done very well, although PT lens is a bit closer to 100% than LR3. But I prefer to have slightly dark corners in most cases, so LR3 is the winner here as well.

And it works in a split second, so my workflow is much easier and faster now! The two hours it took to create the profile are very well spent (but remember that I needed 10 hours or so to find the bugs in ALPC)

 

To be fair I must mention that I have no means to check whether the lens correction profile in PT Lens is as sophisticated as the one I created, I took the time to shoot 90 pics of the calibration chart, maybe the guy who created the profile for PT lens used a simpler approach which still is pretty accurate.

 

Final remark: Looking at the values of the correction factors, Leica did a great job calculating the aspheric lens for the V-Lux1, I will use the lens correction only in cases like architectural photography, as the lens errors in most cases are smaller than the artefacts created if you tweak at pixel level.

[photolandscape]

I have asked Adobe to build the necessary "hooks" into LR. So far they have not

 

Sandy

 

Sandy, as always, you are a good man and a good man is hard to find. It's awfully nice of you to request it, and I hope Adobe will get to it soon. Has Adobe added lots of other lens profiles for M-mount lenses that I can access on their website (but which didn't come with CS5 in the first place?)

[sandymc]

Has Adobe added lots of other lens profiles for M-mount lenses that I can access on their website (but which didn't come with CS5 in the first place?)

 

Not that I'm aware of.

 

Sandy

[01af]

Has Adobe added lots of other lens profiles for M-mount lenses that I can access on their website ...?

Actually it would be Leica's job to provide us with lens profiles for Camera Raw/Lightroom. After all, Lightroom is the raw processor of their choice, and the lens manufacturer/designer can create highly accurate profiles right out of their lens design blueprints rather than having to twiddle with calibration charts and test shots.

[andybarton]

I was having a play with the software this morning with a view to setting up a profile for my 28 Elmarit-R

 

But, I don't think my life is long enough to understand half of what one is supposed to do in order to make a calibration. Fortuitously, a Nikon preset for one of its lenses works very well with the very minor distortion one gets with the 28 at full frame.

 

So. There we are.