In addition to aerial lanscape photography that I conduct through the open window of my small personal airplane, on occasion I photograph landscape through the high quality glass of a jet airliner's pressurized cockpit windows. Such glass is distortion-free except for small random imperfections, usually at the edges of the pane; however, some panes have otherwise acceptable minor distortions on the middle area, causing problems for me as a photographer rather than as a pilot. Such imperfections can "smear" part of an otherwise sharp image.
Attached is an example I recently photogrpahed with a Leica Q2 through the flat, thick glass of a Boeing 737's cockpit side-window above the Alaska Range with Denali on the horizon. Save for a very subtle softening in a small area along the left edge, overall the photograph is as sharp as I can expect from a Q2, except for the distortion seen at the bottom in one area, as seen in the screenshot of the cropped-in image. Other 737s in the fleet have panes with flaws higher in the frame, so I have to rely on luck more often than I wish to.
Having begun to employ AI sharpening and generative AI to effect small corrections in LR Classic for minor distracting elements, it seems to me that an AI-driven brush tool for comparing surrounding areas and sharpening small distortions such as seen in my examples, would be feasible and generally useful for the user community, particularly for inanimate subjects; such an ability to correct optical distortion, I imagine, would be more challenging for portraiture, though in all likelihood not applicable in any case. As ChatGPT put it during my cursory research of this idea, the tool: "Complements existing 'Generative Fill' and 'Lens Correction' features by addressing small-scale, non-parametric optical defects."
As an aerial landscape photographer it's not always possible to avoid aiming through non-optically perfect glass or other transparent materials. The surprisingly excellent overall optical quality of my office-space glass (the B737's flight deck), even (and usually) when aiming obliquely, merits a tool to correct the small random imperfections; I have several gallery-quality prints from the Leica, a Fujifilm GFX and even the iPhone 13 and 15 Pros that luckily avoided distracting imperfections, as well as so many other image files that could use such a tool to subtly clean up those random imperfections in the glass.
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