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Colin Southern
Known Participant
March 5, 2024
Open for Voting

Option to Have ACR Distortion Tool Constrained to Only Horizontal or Vertical Direction

  • March 5, 2024
  • 4 replies
  • 305 views

When digitising art paintings by panning the camera - taking multiple shots - and then stitching them together with Photomerge, the resulting image usually contains significant concave distortion along the long edges (especially when the art has a high aspect ratio of 3:1 or greater).

 

In ACR (as a filter) the distortion tool can straighten these curved horizontal edges well, but because it works in both planes simultaniously, this then results in the vertical sides (that were relatively straight to begin with) taking on a convex curvature.

 

The only way I've found to adjust the image is to firstly get the "best compromise" to all edges in ACR using the distortion tool and then attempt to "fine-tune" the image using warp transforms. If the art being digitised is already framed then this technique doesn't work well because it's virtually impossible to get an edge perfectly straight using the warp transform (no matter how many adjustment handles I add). And even if the art isn't framed it's usually still necessary to crop a bit of the image off to straighten the edge out which is less than ideal.

 

A simple (and near perfect) solution would be the addition of a control adjacent to the ACR (as a filter) distortion tool that allowed the adjustment to be applied to (*) Horizontal Only, (*) Vertical Only, or (*) Both.

 

A second (and more complex) solution would be to introduce "square-up and straighten" functionality; perhaps in the same vein as the existing "select and mask" where (optionally) the 4 corners of the object are identified and the high-contrast edges "traced" to identify the edge to the algorithm that then adjusts the entire image in such a way that the edges are parallel and straight.

 

4 replies

thomas_bredenfeld
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 11, 2024

did you try to test stitching in spherical vs. cylindrical mode? imho a 2-way correction on a spherical projection should work better than on a cylindrical projection. i'm not sure right now, but haven't time enough to test this.
another way is to try a professional stitching app like https://ptgui.com. i'm doing perfectly aligned artwork stitches with it.

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 5, 2024

Sorry, I missed that bit, I was focused on ACR :]

Colin Southern
Known Participant
March 5, 2024

Hi Stephen,

 

Yes. Mentioned above ("[snip]and then stitching them together with Photomerge").

 

I started with a discussion here:

 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/correcting-image-distortion-after-photomerging/m-p/14464043#M783168

 

But despite receiving a number of replies suggesting ways to minimise said distortion (at the expense of making the process uneconomic and introducing other issues), there doesn't appear to be an existing tool that does the job properly; hense the feature request.

 

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 5, 2024

I realise that this is an ACR request, however, have you looked at the regular Photoshop panorama stitching (Photomerge)?

 

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/create-panoramic-images-photomerge.html