When you need to do any kind of job, you use the right tool.
For photographers, that right tool today is Adobe Lightroom, more often than not. Non-destructive editing. Applying edits to multiple images. Super-quick edits for common tasks. If you own one piece of software, it should be Lightroom (or if you prefer, Aperture, its Apple-only equivalent).
But sometimes you may need Photoshop. I use Photoshop for perhaps 0.5% of my images. Like this one, of my living room part finished, earlier today:
That is fine, but since I had to tilt the lens down a little, the verticals diverge at the top. This is inevitable – it’s physics.
But it is not nice. And the good news: it can be fixed in Photoshop. See here, where the verticals are now once again vertical:
You do that as follows:
- From within Lightroom, when looking at this image select EDIT IN.. and choose Photoshop (in my case, CS5). Your image now opens in Photoshop.
- Duplicate the background layer.
- In the new layer, in the EDIT menu, use function TRANSFORM, and within that select DISTORT.
- You can now pull out any corner or side any way you like. You may want to use rulers to see when vertical is really vertical, and horizontal really horizontal.
Now accept the edit, and save the image. You are back in Lightroom looking at your new image.
That’s a quick, simple edit, and one you can only do in Photoshop. From within Lightroom. The right tool for the job.
Does Aperature do everything that Lightroom does?
Not exactly, but it covers the same needs and the same functionality, broadly.
Lightroom 3 gives you similar tool to correct distortion, but it is not as easy to use as the TRANSFORM tool in CS5 in my opinion. So there is one less reason to leave Lightroom.
Lens correction will also align verticals and I find it easier to use for that.
Yup, a good tool in particular for “pincushion” or “barrel” distortion.