P: Disable built-in lens profile

IMHO applying 100% Distortion and 100% Vignetting correction is rarely necessary and can cause image degradation (cropping, elongation, softening, and amplification of lens aberrations such as astigmatism). These "defects" are even more pronounced in images that use a built-in lens profile due to the larger amount of distortion and vignetting correction required at wide-angle focal lengths.

For most of my DSLR lenses I set the Lens Profile "default settings" to 0 Distortion and 50 Vignetting correction. These settings are only adjusted when an image exhibits "visible" rectilinear distortion or vignetting. The ability to selectively change built-in lens profile corrections (0-100) can improve over-all image quality in many cases.

Thanks.

But again : only LR behaves like this. C1P has even a slider from 0% to 100% to adjust CA correction, distortion correction and light falloff, 100% beeing the selected profile.



DXO is even more advanced with a dedicated module in Viewpoint. It is really not an issue with manufacturers.

LR really lags behind and all that has to be done is just to let the checkbox work as with an "external" profile : "enable checkbox -> enable profile" and "disable checkbox -> disable profile" while here, we have "disable checkbox -> enable profile"

And again, it is not a small detail for pixel peepers. Pros with bulky and perfect lenses won't care, but with the mobile stuff and everything, I throught that Adobe would take care of hobbyists as well.

Maybe Olympus/Panasonic didn't want us to see how much we're losing due to lens distortion! 😉 Gets my vote anyway.

In capture one, you can see how the profile crops the sensor area. Even by keeping things rectilinear, a lot is lost by LR, and unrecoverable.



Other use case :

• even rectilinear, recover small framing mistakes

Samples

Let me consider a Canon G7X. I could have done the same with other compacts or mirrorless cameras with heavilly distorted lenses, and built-in profiles. I'll take a G7XII sample from dpreview.

This is what you get OOC or developed by LR (soft corners due to heavy stretching)


This is the actual full sensor data (as you can get with C1P, DXO or any RAW convertor I could test, except LR) : there is vignetting but the angle of view is actually (much) wider than 24mm (FFeqvt), and 
 

This is what you get with a manual crop : by comparison with the Lightroom version, the angle of view is actually larger but LR prevents you to take advantage of your gear and hides large areas of your sensor.


What's wrong ?

In LR interface, we have this dialog :


But when the profile is built-in (as usual with compacts and mirrorless), the "Enable Profile Corrections" has no effect. Checked or unchecked, the profile is always enabled.

So, LR prevents to disable built-in profiles, and prevent users to take full advantage of their gear.

How to solve ?

Let the checkbox work as it should.

Other use cases (mostly wide angle with compact lenses)

Some people love shooting with fisheyes when they prefer to preserve natural and unstreched shapes rather than straight lines. It is often not the case for architecture but in situations such as

• wide angle portraits
• wide angle group shots with streched people on the border
• wide angle landscapes where straight lines are not mandatory
• wide angle with a priority to sharp corners above straight lines

rectilinerar projection are not always suitable, and people (like me) prefer keeping "distortion"μ.

Only LR forces users to perform rectilinear projections. I have no problem with enbling this by default, but the checkbox should work and the built-in profiles should be possibly disabled.

Note that sometimes, people complain about tiny details. This problem is visible even at very low resolutions. It affects the global geometry of an image. Adobe should let the users some creative possibilies.

Samples

Let me consider a Canon G7X. I could have done the same with other compacts or mirrorless cameras with heavilly distorted lenses, and buil-in profiles.

This is what it looks like OOC or developed by LR

I haven't heard the slightest hint along those lines. If you could post a bunch of examples that are a lot better without the built in lens profiles applied, it might gain a little more traction.

With december's new autotone (it was unuseable before), it is more and more tempting for me to switch back from Capture One (DAM is so poor...) to LR again.

But this built-in lens profiles thing is just a complete dealbreaker given my gear.

Could an Adobe insider tell me if this change is on a ToDo list ? 

I made the same discovery after opening a similar Canon G9XII camera raw file in RawDigger to check for highlight clipping. On the widest 10.2mm lens setting the lens has a 28mm equivalent 35mm focal length, but the raw image has considerably more angle of view approximating about 24mm focal length. There is a high amount of rectilinear distortion (think fisheye), but a landscape image with no defined horizontal or vertical elements (trees, sky, etc.) probably could be used without correction. I process the RawDigger Export TIFF file using PS Adaptive Wide Angle Filter set for fisheye correction and horizontal and vertical constraint lines to remove all rectilinear distortion with good results.

I tried another experiment today with a Canon G9XII RawDigger TIFF Export file using only LR's Transform panel and Lens Profile manual Distortion control. The results are virtually identical in rectilinear correction and over-all sharpness. So if Adobe adds the requested capability to dial-back the 'Built-In Lens Profile' Distortion correction you could get the same results without having to go outside of LR. Sweet!

Below LR Survey view shows:
Original Raw File w/o any transforms (Top-Left)
RawDigger TIFF Export File with no 'Built-In Filter' applied (Bottom-Left)
RawDigger TIFF Export File with PS Adaptive Wide Angle Filter applied (Bottom-Right)
RawDigger TIFF Export File with LR manual Transform and Distortion controls applied (Top-Right)

It's probably only helpful for raw files shot at the widest lens settings when you need a slightly wider angle of view. It works very well for that purpose as shown below.

(click on image to see full-size)

You exactly get the point. For people who are not obsessed by straight lines but rather prefer unstreched (thus more natural looking) objects on the borders, it is necessary to be able to control distortion correction for built-in profiles the same way as it works with external profiles. Besides, it should be VERY easy to perform : just let the existing checkbox play its role. It shouldn't require more than a very few lines of code.

With Capture One Pro, my Canon G7XII is completely transformed. For instance, the wide angle is actually more like 21mm or 22mm when you use the full sensor, and not 24mm as croped by Canon+LR. I'd like to switch to LR but as it, I just can't since it would dramatically restraint my gear.

I understand that for such cams, SW correction is somehow "part of the system". So I can get that by default, the built-in profile is enabled. But a sowftare which claims beeing a RAW converter should let the user choose to actually using all the RAW data.