DxO ViewPoint

DxO ViewPoint takes as its mission one of the more intractable problems in photography?the distortion that results from using a wide angle lens and not shooting directly at your subject. Paris-based DxO has serious cred in the digital photography realm, and it's well-positioned to tackle this problem. The company creates testing software used by the major digital camera manufacturers themselves. We've already reviewed the impressive DxO Optics, which can pull photo information from a raw camera file and tune an image based on your lens and sensor characteristics with impressive results. The $79 ViewPoint (a try-before-you buy download is available) works as a standalone application, a Photoshop plugin, or a Lightroom plugin.

The Problems
DxO refers to the major issue ViewPoint tries to solve as "volume anamorphosis," which describes what happens to, for example, a head at the side of a wide-angle shot that looks stretched. The correct form of the originally 3D subject is changed, and not usually in a pleasing way! ViewPoint also can correct more straightforward perspective problems, for example, if you're pointing the camera up at a building and want the shot to look straight on.

Setup and Interface
I tried the standalone version on a 3.4GHz quad-core Windows 8 test machine (it's available for Mac OS X, as well). At 255MB, it's not the smallest program you'll download and install. When you install ViewPoint with custom settings, you can choose to install plugins for Photoshop CS3 through CS6 and/or Lightroom.

ViewPoint's standalone application window sports the simple, pleasing dark gray user interface found in up-to-date photo apps. You can drag-and-drop a photo or open it the old fashioned way with a File dialog to start working on a photo. The large central work area is flanked to the right with a panel offering the program's corrections?Anamorphosis, Keystoning, Horizon, and Crop, along with a loupe.

Helpful diagrammatic buttons visually portray what each tool does. A clear full-screen button at top right removes distracting OS borders. A hand zoom slider and optional grid overlay, as well as side-by-side before/after views complete the set of useful interface tools.

Correcting Volume Anamorphosis
I compared ViewPoint's Anamorphosis correction tools with Lightroom's Upright correction, which also attempts to fix geometry problems in photos. I'd had fairly good success with that earlier, but now I pit it side-by-side against the single-missioned ViewPoint. While Upright works acceptably for inanimate objects, human features are a different story. Correcting with Lightroom's Auto option, a face in the corner of a wide shot was cut out of the picture, and the subject's honker actually grew unnaturally longer. Using ViewPoint's Anamorphic tool, you choose one of two buttons?one for photos simply stretched side-to-side, and another for those stretched in all the corners. I managed to get the face looking a lot more naturally proportioned, and the subject still fit it in the frame.

Lightroom's Vertical choice did a better job than its Auto or Full choice, which drastically distorted the face, but for both of those the face was still cut off. What's more, ViewPoint let me adjust the strength of the correction, rather than just offering on and off.

When it came to architecture, Lightroom's Upright tool did an okay job of making lopsided buildings indeed look upright with a click, but again, I could get better results with ViewPoint.? The DxO app's Keystoning and Horizon tools can work automatically, to good effect, but they also let you use guidelines to show the program lines that should be parallel or horizontal. The guidelines are very easy to control, with two anchor points that can be placed anywhere along the line.

Once you've got the perspective looking right, you hit the Apply button. Doing this also crops the photo, since the edges are no longer rectangular after the corrections.

ViewPoint's final corrections are Horizon and Crop. The latter is pretty self-explanatory, though it does offer an Auto mode to work with the previous corrections. Horizon lets you draw either a horizontal or vertical line to render a landscape level.

At $79, DxO ViewPoint won't be of interest to casual digital photographers, but those who make their living behind the camera, or just take the photographic art very seriously will want to add it to their digital darkroom's software arsenal. ViewPoint is especially essential for photographers of groups of people, where you need to use a wide angle lens but your customers won't be happy with folks on the sides having stretched physiognomies. You just won't find another program that resolves this problem as effectively. For that, DxO ViewPoint earns a PCMag Editors' Choice for photo-correction software.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/JJj45qCZkpY/0,2817,2420248,00.asp

san francisco 49ers san francisco 49ers stan musial Mega 49ers lance armstrong Earl Weaver