Adjusting background distortion, plus news

[Connected Photographer]

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March 7, 2004 INSIDE THIS ISSUE Adjusting background distortion This week's news

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THIS WEEK'S POWERTIP
Adjusting background distortion
By David Gewirtz

Last week, we awarded ImageAlign Pro our Plug-in of the Month award. That's a tool that'll help you adjust your images to correct lens distortion. But at $199, it's not for everyone. This week, I'm going to show you a few simple tricks to fix up your own images using some simple transforms in Photoshop (this will also work in Elements).

Figure A shows a picture of Arte Fontane, IBM's Senior Marketing Manager. I took this picture when we were down at Lotusphere last month, covering some IBM announcements.

FIGURE A

Arte's looking spiffy, but the picture needs some work. Click picture for a larger image.

Because of the flash blowback (you can see it to the left of Arte's face), we didn't run this picture in DominoPower. But it's ideal for our purposes because of the striped wallpaper in the background. As you can see, the stripes aren't vertical in the picture. I shot the image at about 30mm, and the lens distorted the background.

This is pretty easy to fix. As you look at the above image, you'll notice a selection rectangle and some handles. That's because I selected the entire image, and then chose Transform->Distort from the Edit menu. By moving the top right handle in slightly to the left, the stripes were returned to vertical, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Now the walls are more straight up and down. Click picture for a larger image.

One minor side effect of moving the wallpaper was that the picture frame was no longer horizontal. Honestly, I don't think it was fully level when the image was taken, but we can help things along, can't we? Once more, I selected the entire image and used Transform->Distort, this time to slightly drop the top, left handle, and to move the top, right handle a slight bit further to the right.

You can see this in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Let's make that picture frame level. Click picture for a larger image.

One of the reasons I tend to show more of the canvas outside the image is to give me space to move the distortion outside the image. Sometimes you'll need to stretch beyond the picture's boundaries, and this will give you some workspace.

Of course, now that we've done our adjustments, some of the background shows through. A simple crop cleans it all up, and you can see the final image in Figure D.

FIGURE D

Everything's on the straight and narrow now. Click picture for a larger image.

Sometimes, plug-ins are the only way to get something done. But there's so much built into modern image editing tools, pictures can often be radically improved with only a few menu selections, using built-in capabilities.

David Gewirtz is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines and the author of The Flexible Enterprise and Lotus Notes Revealed! He can be reached via email at address@hidden. You can see David's photographic artwork at his personal Web site, http://www.Gewirtz.com.

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CONNECTED PHOTOGRAPHER NEWS CENTER
This week's news
Want to get the very latest photography news? The Connected Photographer News Center is updated every day with news of product releases, industry info, tips, techniques, and pointers to great photography resources on the Web. Here's this week's news:

Hitachi's holographic-like display
Hitachi announced that it has developed a holographic-like display called the Transpost, which allows 360 degree viewing of an object rendered in light without wearing any special glasses.

Noise Ninja
Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape has a review of the software-based noise reduction product Noise Ninja from Picturecode.

Women are the new smart photographers
The new generation of digital photographers is female. According to digital photofinisher BONUSPRINT, the number of digital print orders from women has doubled since the launch of its online photo processing service in 2002.

Photoshop CS update to add X3F support
A planned update to the Camera Raw Plugin for Photoshop CS will add support for the X3F (RAW) file format used by the Sigma SD9 and SD10 digital SLRs.

Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n review
Charlotte Lowrie of MSN Photos has this hands-on first-look review of the new Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n 14 megapixel digital camera.

Lensbabies flexible lens for SLR cameras
Lensbabies has introduced The Original Lensbaby, a flexible camera lens that creates a "sweet spot" area of focus that photographers can move around the image area by bending the flexible lens tubing.

PermaJet exhibits at Focus
New displays at the show this year include an Epson 2100 Permaflow continuous inking system, a full Closed Loop Profile service for custom profiling for monitors, scanners, cameras and printers, and a new range of British made fine art papers launched under the name ImageLife.

Lastolite Ezybalance
The Ezybalance will aid a number of functions, including exposure measurement, contrast measurement, color balancing and the setting of white balance.

HiTi 730PS printer review
Hi-Touch's new larger format 6 x 8 inch dye sub printer, the 730PS, has a controller with a color LCD and flash memory card slots so it can be used without a computer as easily as with a computer.

Philips Fluid Lenses
Philips Research is demonstrating a unique variable-focus lens system that has no mechanical moving parts.

Sigma working on Four Thirds lenses
Sigma announced development of 18-50 mm F3.5, F5.6 and 55-200 mm F4.0, F5.6 lenses which will be compatible with the Four Thirds System.

Apple offers discount to PhotoshopWorld attendees
Officials with the PhotoshopWorld Conference & Expo and announced that attendees who purchase any item from Apple Computer’s new flagship store in San Francisco’s Union Square location will receive a 10% discount off their purchase through Friday, March 5.

Gateway, Nikon cameras share award
A press release issued Gateway details its DC-T50 digital camera, which received an award from Best Magazine at the recent Digital Focus press event held before this year's PMA show.

NikonNet showcases Ami Vitale
This March, NikonNet's inspiring monthly Legends Behind the Lens honors the work of photojournalist Ami Vitale and delves into her passion and drive for photographing people and communities living in adverse conditions.

PhotoMix has moved
fCoder Group has announced that PhotoMix has moved to its own domain. PhotoMix is designed to grant amateur photographers a new way of presenting their works.

Photography's narrative potential
The narrative potential of photography is the subject explored by PhotoSynkyria 2004, the annual, big photographic event in Thessaloniki that, this year, includes more than 20 photography exhibitions held throughout the city’s venues.

Garage studios challenge Hollywood
Low-end systems allow editors to establish scene order, while more sophisticated ones add bells and whistles like specialized fades and color correction.

Olympus Mju III-80 35mm camera
The new Olympus Mju III–80 is available in both standard models and a Quatzdate version for those who want the date and time of their pictures burned onto their negatives.

The Contax SL-300RT with leather body
Contax introduces its version of the Kyocera SL300R. The specs of the Contax SL300 are identical, a 3x optical zoom lens developed by Carl Zeiss, and adoption of Kyocera's image processing system ''RTUNE'' also enables full-memory, consecutive shooting at around 3.5 frames/second but with easy-to-hold genuine leather coverings on the front casing.

Walk-up photofinishing in 10 minutes
The KODAK Film Processing Station uses proprietary technologies that remove complex wet-chemical handling from the photofinishing equation. It is the only fully automatic photo processing system designed for consumers to process their own film, with no prior training.

Olympus C-5060 Wide Zoom
As a successor to their C5050, Olympus has released the Camedia C-5060 Wide Zoom, a 5.1 megapixel camera that features a 4x wide-angle zoom equivalent to 27 to 110mm in 35mm terms.

Sandisk T-Flash
SanDisk introduced the world's smallest removable flash memory storage format. About the size of a fingernail, T-Flash is designed for new mobile phones, digital cameras, video capture, MP3 players, and video games.

Texture Maker v2.7
Reichert Software Engineering (R.S.E.), announced the release of Texture Maker v2.7, a seamless texture generator and designer. The application contains everything needed to create seamless textures for use in 3D rendering packages, game development, web graphics, image and video editing. Texture Maker can be extended with plugins and automates complex operations with its scripting abilities.

Inkjet refill users dissatisfied
A recent survey of U.S. ink jet refill kit users found that respondents were generally unhappy with the life of the cartridge after the refilling process compared with the life of OEM ink jet cartridges. Sixty-five percent of respondents said that refill kits' cartridge life was worse or much worse than that of OEM ink cartridges, while just 8 percent said refill kits were much better or better than OEM cartridges in this respect.

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