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Hi
from my perspective (no pun intended) one of the biggest things missing from Photos is the an ability to automatically perform keystoning and perspective correction. While there are manual sliders for horizontal and vertical correction missing are skew and aspect corrections. The ability for an AI directed automated keystone function would be a great productivity enhancement to Nitro (currently I have to round trip to other photo editors).
Similarly an AI directed auto straighten function which could be applied to a selection of photos would be useful as well.
Are these automation features on the roadmap?
thx
JamesI have looked into auto straighten in particular and have found the algorithms to be shockingly bad. I will see if there are improvements for perspective and straighten.
As far as skew and such, Nitro does have the 4 point perspective corrector, which also addresses skew. You mark the points that should be rectangular and it fixes it. I plan to improve it so that you can zoom it out more reliably.
James, auto-correction is always a bit of a gamble, but I believe, instead of trying to autocorrect in other photo editors you might be just as quick remaining inside Nitro… no, I just tried, sorry. Phew.
The problem with 4 point perspective corrector is that you really need to know how the new perspective should look like before your start it. In most other apps I align two construction-lines along two lines in the image which should be straight, either upright or horizontally. This is a lot of try & error in Nitro and the fact, that a portion of the image is enlarged massively and I first need to correct “enlargement” makes it less useful than most other competitors.
It’s not always about rectangularity in the image, depending on my perspective towards a facade. And cropping away huge chunks of the image which are outside the field of the perspective corrector makes the result (too often) useless. This looks like a lot of work needed.
I’m looking at a video of Capture One and I see what it is doing, but I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different from the Nitro corrector, with two differences:
1) The amount of correction can be controlled (so you can specify the correction, but then only apply a portion of it)
2) The amount of crop looks to be controllable also.
3) the interface is different – it looks like it places four points on the image and then you use sliders to move the points around.I cannot say whether it’s better than simply placing four points on the image. Perhaps the Nitro UI needs to be less general purpose since you can do basically anything with four points.
The amount of crop is something I am going to provide control over, so it won’t remove as much of the image.
Capture One isn’t perfect but its a great start and is a good comparison – it has the ability to auto correct either vertically, horizontal or both (you choose which is appropriate – I generally choose vertical as a starting point) and of course it allows manual adjustments as well. It certainly doesn’t get it right all the time (I’d say about 80%) though this is certainly a great start. Strangely it struggles a little with seascape horizons, they often need a slight tweak afterwards. So using an auto correct is a quick starting point if the model can determine the dominant verticals (or horizontals) and I find it does a reasonable job.
The ability to run through perspective correction immediately after you upload a new set of photos in one batch makes a big difference. Yes you still need to adjust a few manually but it’s a lot quicker than placing points manually on each image and moving through your ingested batch 1 photo a time.
The four points correction is used less often as, as you say Joachim, its quite a unique use case. You also mention cropping, CA1 at least lets adjust the crop and you can heal/clone into the alpha areas though these tools are a little rudimentary in CA1. I find if I really want to infill I’ll have to take the photo out to something that is a little more intelligent with its infill.
I’ll have a further play with Nitro. Thanks for your thoughts
I’m using the last version without subscription (16.2.6.7), so I can’t say anything about 16.6. But I see the main differences:
Vertical, horizontal or both at once can be corrected by two or four lines, each with two handles. The handles could be even more helpful, if Crapture One devs would have considered to let them become a loupe, when the cursor is on them, but maybe the newer versions are improved.
This makes the process easy to understand, compared to the sliders of Nitro. I simply adjust to line to an object which needs to be upright or horizontally Also, I don’t need to level the image before I can try to correct the perspective. And thanks to the lines, I can use small portions of the image and still get a good result. Of course, I’m used to it and maybe need more time to get used to Nitro’s way. But if I have to adjust more than one image, I have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the tools, still need more time and get less convincing results.
The 4 point adjustment of C1 (and Nitro, too) is good to quickly get a frame of a painting, a window or a monitor screen in an image rectangular. But an image of houses in an alley is different, here I only need verticals.
As @JillJam stated, the auto-correction is a very good starting point and thanks to the guiding lines (?) adjustment of facades with old houses with not much straight or upright lines still can be done.
Tried to put a screen video together: https://sojujo.smugmug.com/Other/DxO-Forum/n-Cr7pHp/i-kZCxcfd/A The facade in the video also shows a part, which is not vertical (will of architect), so I had to use lines for the outside of the image. It’s not the average use case. But using the sliders sometimes just shows the problem that my camera was not exactly vertical in that moment which the needs my mouse to travel long distances between straightening and perspective tool. And the 4 point tool is simply unforeseeable for me.
Thanks Joachim, that’s helpful. I see what you mean now.
Two things:
1) When you reset the Perspective adjustment, the sliders were disabled. That is a bug I need to fix.
2) The controls went away – that is the full screen feature – when you click on the image, the controls hide. Clicking again brings them back. I might make that a preference.
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