Originally posted by szffagier what do you think? is there a loss of quality after defishing? I can't really find any useful information on this
You can check out my
experiments with defishing HERE.
kh123... probably knows more about technical aspects than I, so note his comments.
You actually can do quite a bit in Lightroom in the new Transform section of the latest LR CC.
- Before you use this Transform section, you should first use the Lens Correction section to deal with lens distortions. For most of my lenses, enabling the automatic Profile Corrections does a pretty good job. You do have the option of adjusting the amount of distortion and vignetting to get the right look. I can even do a fairly decent job of defishing fisheye lenses with this. (Under Lens Correction is also where you can enable and adjust chromatic aberration removal.)
- Once the lens correction is done, then go to the new Transform section to correct perspective distortion. It works quite well, and it is rather intuitive. You can use the Auto or Full to have the pic corrected automatically, but using the manual or Guided gives more control. It's basically a matter of drawing two or more parallel and/or perpendicular lines, and the photo is corrected. You still have the option of manipulating everything using the manual sliders.
- Before this feature was added, I had purchased DxO Viewpoint 2. That little program offers a lot of control, and can do a bit more than the new Transform in CC, but it only works with TIFF or JPG (which means that my DNG files need to be converted first). Result: I think I will be able to do most of my work in LR CC using Lens Correction and Transform, but if I really want to do something special, I'll jump over to DxO Viewpoint.
As for final results and quality: Defishing a fisheye works with software processing much like an UWA rectilinear lens does with the physical characteristics of the lens elements. The main difference is that with the fisheye, you're going to chop off a lot of edges to get a field of view and perspective similar to the rectilinear. With the UWA rectilinear, you may get soft borders since a lot of light is being bent to gain the rectilinear view. In general, what I have found (and someone can correct me), the end result of a defished fisheye and an UWA rectilinear may be similar, but you usually have more pixels of detail with an UWA. Depending on how much enlargement you do, however, either the FE or the UWA may work perfectly well.