December 17, 2004

Curious George: Perspectiveless Snapshots If you tilt a camera upwards or downwards, the resulting photograph can take on "lines of perspective". There are plug-ins for Photoshop that warp a digital photograph to make everything again "isometric", I think is the term. Is there a technique or trick with old SLR cameras to remove this warped perspective before the picture is taken, or are special lenses used?
posted by Alex Reynolds 20 years ago
  • Tilt-shift lenses. Canon whole bunch of 'em
  • an older article covering some other options (you'll need to scroll a bit to the section of perspective correction)
  • This is very helpful. Thanks so much!
  • View cameras (with the bellows) are much better at this, but here is some more info on the shift-tilt solution recommended: How shift-tilt lenses change your life & Shutterbug article.
  • Didn't know such a thing existed. Would be very interested in seeing some with/without shift tilt lens pictures.
  • LarimdaME, the link polychrome posted contains a bunch of with/without examples near the end of the page; look for the "Perspective Correction" heading. Of course, this technique doesn't really change the actual perspective of the pictures, it just adds a distortion that's complementary to the perspective of the scene. You can sometimes see parallax errors in commercial photography that are a sign that some perspective correction technique was used.
  • Yeah, tilt-shift lenses- they're somewhat expensive though- and don't they only correct perspective vertically? Or did I dream that... I can't remember... I wouldn't mind having one though, if it wasn't for the price...
  • Costly, yes, but depending on where you live you can probably rent one for not much money.
  • Shift-tilt lenses are also commenly used on cinema projectors. They enable to keep the focus the same in the vertical plane and still reach the bottom of the screen from high above the theatre. So the projector is actually horizontal but because of the shift-tilt lens the projected image is moved down. When you use shift-tilted lenses there is no distortion, when you use a photoshop plugin to achieve the same there is distortion, because the focus is not the same from top to bottom of, say, a building. Do I make sense? It's hard to explain.
  • When you use shift-tilted lenses there is no distortion, when you use a photoshop plugin to achieve the same there is distortion, because the focus is not the same from top to bottom of, say, a building. Do I make sense? It's hard to explain. Would the distortion be minimal if I used settings that give a deep field of focus, i.e. like a high f-stop value. I think I would need more light, if I understand properly, the higher the f-stop I use, but I get a sharper image. Am I hitting the right target?
  • You could also go all out (Google cache) and use a view camera (pdf).