Working with the "Rectify" tool

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greenmorpher
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Working with the "Rectify" tool

Beitrag von greenmorpher »

Hello Martin

I can't seem to restore the Digital Camera|Rectify tool to zero settling, i.e. to a rectangle.

I also wonder whether this tool could be made more complex with the degrees of departure of each of the four sides from rectilinear being able to be measured and set by measurement.

As it is, this is a potentially excellent tool, but it suffers from lack of precision when setting it.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com
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Koyaanis
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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True, needs work. But using the lasso tool can do the same thing if you are going to have to crop too.

After (or before) selecting a rectangular lasso area, then click on the layer-selection tool (arrow tool). In its tool properties choose either Distort Persp. or Distort Persp. Symm. Then go back to your lasso tool. You'll find out that these layer adjustment modes are now being applied to your lasso adjustment handles. By using a combo of Shift, Ctrl, and Alt keys (on the PC), you are able to quicky change between all types of symmetry distortions.

In your lasso's tool options make sure you have "straighten" selected. Then when you crop it will apply those rotations and perspective changes to your image. With one tool on the right settings you can perform a rotation, symmetry corrections, feathered edge, and crop, all with one button press.

The one huge drawback to this is that you can't use some smaller subjects in the image for your edges to align to. (Edges of buildings, etc.) As you can with the Rectify Tool. If there was an option to NOT crop when using the lasso tool, then it would provide all the functionality of both tools. Something as simple as an "Apply, No Crop" button.

It would be handy too if that layer-selection drop-down menu of correction mode types (Scale, Rotate, Shear, Distort Persp., Scale Special) were also on the lasso tool's options to make it quicker, but it's nice to know it can be applied to both tools.

If both those changes were made to the Lasso Tool, adding that mode drop-down menu, and adding an "Apply, No Crop" button, then they could do away with that Camera Rectify filter completely.
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Hoogo
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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Koyaanis hat geschrieben:It would be handy too if that layer-selection drop-down menu of correction mode types (Scale, Rotate, Shear, Distort Persp., Scale Special) were also on the lasso tool's options to make it quicker, but it's nice to know it can be applied to both tools.
I didn't know that the dropdown of the layer tool also appllicates to the lasso-tool. The lasso-tool has a context-menu, right-click into the picture, and there are the modes.
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Koyaanis
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

Beitrag von Koyaanis »

Hoogo hat geschrieben:
Koyaanis hat geschrieben:It would be handy too if that layer-selection drop-down menu of correction mode types (Scale, Rotate, Shear, Distort Persp., Scale Special) were also on the lasso tool's options to make it quicker, but it's nice to know it can be applied to both tools.
I didn't know that the dropdown of the layer tool also appllicates to the lasso-tool. The lasso-tool has a context-menu, right-click into the picture, and there are the modes.
Thanks. Just another of the hundreds of things I missed before. :)
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greenmorpher
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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Hoogo grunted:
Hoogo hat geschrieben:
Koyaanis hat geschrieben:It would be handy too if that layer-selection drop-down menu of correction mode types (Scale, Rotate, Shear, Distort Persp., Scale Special) were also on the lasso tool's options to make it quicker, but it's nice to know it can be applied to both tools.
I didn't know that the dropdown of the layer tool also appllicates to the lasso-tool. The lasso-tool has a context-menu, right-click into the picture, and there are the modes.
Well, there you go -- knocked sideways by the context sensitive menu AGAIN!!! I use a Mac, and although I have a macally two button plus scroll mouse now, I was brought up on the single button Mac mouse and I just am not in the habit of looking for that menu under the right button.

This is an AMAZING tool. Works like a charm! Works fast. Terrific job.

And it has the advantage, as I see it, that it works on the full size image, which makes the movements required larger. Early on in the DTP revolution, I suffered stress related muscle injuries to both arms trying to make very fine movements on screen with the mouse. Very fine movements mean you get enormous opposing muscle forces throughout your arm and shoulder, so the bigger the movements the better. (I buggered both arms because I am ambidextrous; when I wrecked my right arm, I moved the mouse to my left, and wrecked that too before I worked out how I was doing it. It took nearly two years to recover, and I am still somewhat weak in both arms as a result. I have to work on the computer sitting in a chair with arms and my elbows supported on those arms.)

But why not have this amazing tool out in the open?

There is actually a great feature of Canvas that was introduced in v.9 and expanded and made to work better in v.X. This is the context sensitive "Properties Bar". I didn’t like it initially -- Canvas also has a lot of capabilities in palettes and there is a docking bar for them so they are readily accessible there -- but when I got down to using Canvas X, I suddenly found I was using the Properties Bar all the time. You select a tool, and the Properties Bar (across the top of the screen) shows what you can do with that tool, and provides e.g. measurement boxes so you can take actions by measurement. I've attached an example which shows both the Properties Bar (here responding to a photograph on a page -- the way everything is shown in the Canvas window -- which has been selected) and the docking bar with my standard selection of palette tags showing.

In terms of user interface, PL32 could well benefit from something like that. Incidentally, it shouldn't be across the top of the screen as it is in Canvas -- it should be down the side or optional -- like the AppleWorks Toolbar.

But in the meantime, I'll keep trying to remember to check the right button every time I use a tool! And I will never use the Dikgital; Camera|Rectify again!

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com
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Koyaanis
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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These perspective correction tools (and the lens distortion correction tools) is another area where I'd like to see the option for Lanczos-3/8 be allowed. There's just as much if not more info being distorted than a simple resize or rotation. Finer details will be lost using the default bicubic with these. With the faster computers these days I'd be more than happy to wait for the processing time if I was working on a Final-Final for display image.
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greenmorpher
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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Good point, Koyaanis.

Incidentally, the attached is what I was testing this tool with. It is for a website -- it's a hotel in my local area.

It needed a touch of shear, pushing the top of the tower to the right, then I did symmetrical straightening of the sides, then did a little more to the right side. I have a feeling I should do a touch more there, too. I also reduced the height a little. There ought to be an algorithm that will handle the height/width issue in straightening stuff like this -- something that related the percentage of change to the height to the angle of the lines and (say) the number of storeys in the building (easy to ascertain rather than the height in metres or some other more precise measurement).

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com
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Koyaanis
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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Something that's always been a personal quirk and bug of mine, ever since the view-camera was invented, is people think that if the sides of a building aren't perfectly parallel in an image, they should be. I HIGHLY disagree. That's not how it looks to the human eye, that's now how it looks in reality, that's not how the camera saw it, and to completely remove it totally destroys the realism of any scene.

This is one of those things that I have always strongly felt belongs in the category of, "Just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it."

I'm not saying to not correct for it, but graphic editors (people) should go easy on it. Use keystone correction just enough to create a pleasing image where the slants inward (in altitude) do not detract from the image. But for cripe's sake don't remove it all and make it look just as bad if not more-so, but now in the other over-distorted direction.

:)

(I'm going to keep campaigning against this unnatural folly of over-correcting perspective distortion until the foolish "pros" realize just how foolish and stupid they keep being, and how often they display their total lack of any "compositional eye" for the last 100 years.)

If you apply the correction properly, you will do away with any need to try to fix those "squashed" upper stories in your building. (This again showing how unnatural over-correcting of perspective can introduce even more unnatural distortion.)

Be on the forefront of a campaign to wipe out 100 years of stupidity. Submit that photo with some natural-looking perspective in it. :)

To my eye (and I have a good one for composition, sometimes my photos win on composition alone), your original image is much more pleasing than the corrected one. If I had to vote on which one was best, the original would win, hands down. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's an award-winner, by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just saying between the two the original would win. :)
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Hoogo
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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I don't think that the picture is over-corrected.
The perspective of the human eye is something very special, it has only a sweet spot, and nearly everything you see around that spot is imagination.
Everything looks nice when you compare a single glance of an eye to a picture taken with a normal focal-length. But the comparison becomes difficult for other focal-lenghts, and very strange for big objects that you can only see completely when you move your head.
When you want to take a picture of a building you can do it with a normal focal-length from a bit far away. That should look natural.
Or you use more focal-length from even more far away. Lines will be more perfect, and the impression is stil OK, the building is just somewhat bigger than you would see it with your eye.
But when you are so close to the building that you have to move your head it becomes difficult. To get the same impression you could try to take more photos with normal focal-lenght and stitch them, but neither would the pictures fit nor would the field of depth look natural. With a smaller focal-lenght you can take a picture of the whole building, but you cannot compare the result to an eye. So it's a matter of projection, and that gives a lot of possibilities. Take a fisheye? Or a normal lens? And with a tilt/shift you can even move the layer(?) of the same size and the layer of the same sharpness. I don't think that Scheinpflug's rules are over-correction.
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greenmorpher
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Re: Working with the "Rectify" tool

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I actually took that picture with minimal distortion so I could correct it, Kooyanis. It was a matter of avoiding overhead wires; I couldn't get further away to normalise the picture without getting the wires in. Also without standing on a quite busy road!!!

I always correct -- well, nearly always correct -- pictures of buildings which incorporate the ground and the ground level floor. It is NOT natural for us to see them distorted. If we are looking up, we can't see the ground level.

I was tossing up about taking a deliberately MORE distorted picture by going closer and using the sign "Mentone Hotel" above the door as the lowest point and foreground in the picture. Looking up at that point mimics what naturally occurs and I would NOT have corrected such a picture.

This is a commercial p;icture, by the way; not a competition one. I am in the business of making stuff look natural in these kinds of simple illustrative pix. That's what clients pay me for.

Here's a commercial picture of mine -- looking down. Nope -- I didn’t try to correct perspective there! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23538741/

Not my story, unfortunately.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com