P: Disable built-in lens profile

"Excluding the older models in a contract makes no sense."
"I don't think there is significant cost involved apart from a bit of programmer time."

There may well be separate form contracts covering each camera model that are signed when the camera is released.  If that's true, allowing the application of the lens profile to be disabled for older cameras would require revising those existing contracts. That would involve the legal departments of Adobe and each camera manufacturer, and some junior lawyer would be assigned the task of examining each contract in turn to make sure there's no legal gotchas.  

While that may seem trivial, legal departments in large corporations can be extremely slow, difficult to work with, and excessively focused on their own department's costs rather than the overall good of the business. Since the legal department reports to corporate counsel who reports directly to the CEO, any disagreements between legal and product must ultimately be resolved by the CEO. Do you think the Adobe CEO is going to spend any time thinking about this tiny issue?  Do you think the legal departments at Canon, Nikon, and the other manufacturers care about this?  They often still act as if supporting Lightroom is an annoyance, of little value to most of their customers.

I just tested Panasonic DC-G100 and Canon EOS R6 raw files to get an idea of how this works. Interestingly the lens profile can be turned off (Enable Profile Corrections unchecked) for both camera raw files, but the Panasonic DC-G100 raw files only allow adjusting Distortion Amount with Vignetting grayed out. So it appears there's more to it as far as being able to adjust the amount of correction applied. For me that's really of more value than being able to simply turn off lens corrections. I have all of my lenses set to varying amounts of Distortion and Vignetting correction except for a 50mm macro lens, which is near perfect. Some lenses that use built-in lens correction have fisheye type distortion that is very visible without some correction applied. Here's an example in my reply in this post three years ago.

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/disable-built-in-lens-profile?topic-reply-lis...

I don't think there is significant cost involved apart from a bit of programmer time. All they need to do is allow us to turn off and on the correction using the raw built-in profile. It is a simple switch. They don't need to profile any lenses. Just turn that part of the code path off and on.

So perhaps perhaps the parties have revised the contracts for new cameras but don't want to revise the existing contracts for some reason.  Just a guess.

It's usually "new technology" that companies want to protect. Excluding the older models in a contract makes no sense. It's more likely an Adobe internal decision due to the cost of "updating" all those older camera model lenses. So do it as a longer term "background activity." It should be relatively simple and something a "technician" level employee could perform. I speak from 45 years in the computing technology industry as a system design engineer.

I've stated this in the Adobe forums numerous times, but it bears repeating.
Vignetting and rectilinear distortion correction to make your digital camera images "100% perfect" is generally unnecessary and can even degrade the image quality. Distortion Correction Cons

1)It crops the image to maintain straight image borders–You lose image peripheral area that is corrected. Wide and ultra-wide zoom lenses generally have significant barrel distortion. Applying 100% correction "effectively"increase the focal length, which means that expensive 12-24mm zoom lens may provide something closer to a 14-26mm lens. It also reduces the image resolution in those “stretched” areas due to upscaling interpolation of the image data.

2) Wide angle lenses generally exhibit barrel type distortion, which actually helps to reduce corner and edge"stretching" of the image. By correcting this distortion to make it 100% "geometrically correct" the elongation will become more noticeable. In fact there is software available that can apply"non-rectilinear correction" (volume anamorphosis) to wide angle images to remove some of the elongation. This "added distortion"can actually improve certain images (i.e. people pictures).

As Adobe Engineer Eric Chan outlined at the below post you can simply use the 'Manual' Lens Corrections Distortion slider to add barrel distortion, but then you’ll be cropping the image in addition to the lens profile distortion correction cropping. Allowing manual adjustment of the lens profile provides a more direct and comprehensive solution.


http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/correct_stretching_effect_from_an_ultra_wide_angle_lens

Vignetting Correction Cons

1) Most people are accustomed to seeing some vignetting in photographs and in fact vignetting is sometimes "added"to images to focus attention on the central subject.

2) Wide and ultra-wide angle lenses usually exhibit significant vignetting especially at wide apertures, which can be as much as -3EV. You will need to apply +3EV of exposure compensation in the extreme corners to achieve 100% vignetting correction. This will significantly raise shadow noise and can also reduce image quality due to increased visibility of lens defects such as astigmatism, and coma.

I remember that too being the case for a few select mirrorless cameras that had extreme lens distortion. There was some talk about Adobe being forced to apply correction in those cases. However, I highly doubt that this is true for the recent interchangeable lens mirrorless cameras from Nikon and Canon seeing how you can turn the lens correction off in camera - making the jpeg and the raw when rendered in Nikon Capture NX-D (for the Nikon Z cameras) render without lens correction. Adobe ignores these settings and still applies the built-in profile even if they are turned off in camera! The only thing you can do about this is to hack the raw file and delete the profile from it or render it in other software.

Perhaps this is a contractual issue. In the past, there were hints from Adobe employees on this forum that, as part of the legal agreements giving Adobe permission access to the proprietary information inside raw files, Adobe agreed to always enable the lens profile (can't find those posts now). So perhaps perhaps the parties have revised the contracts for new cameras but don't want to revise the existing contracts for some reason.  Just a guess.

Rikk, I would very strongly suggest this gets implemented for the recent mirrorless cameras that are really DSLRs from Nikon and Canon - i.e. the Z series and the R series. These are used by many pros and we need the control. A simple button to turn the built-in correction on and off. I am of the opinion that on those cameras the built-in correction should be turned off by default or if you select camera settings as the default for the develop, it should react to the camera settings. Right now if you have the lens correction and vignette control turned off in camera for example, Lightroom still applies lens corrections!

I tried it on the Z7 and found out that it is not working:
it was the f2.8 24-70mm nikkor S lens that remained auto corrected in LR9.4
Does it mean Adobe has to make lensprofiles for many lenses anew and before that the auto correction stays on?

Or is it camera related? What is the problem exactly? Why did it take so long to implement it?