perspective help (again)

[Bambi]

so I took this photo of St. John's church in Lunenburg. It's a 3 shot hdr- my only option with the sky and light. But I know from this angle that there's a perspective distortion but I struggle with how to correct it. So while I also would like a general critique- I am specifically asking for help with the perspective fixing.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5176/5578274992_b8a9cf9692_b.jpg

[Iguanasan]

The only correct way to fix it as far as I know is to go back and re-shoot it with a tilt-shift lens. Photoshop has some built in tools to make these types of corrections but since you are not straight on to the church you've got multiple angles to work with which would be a pain. Of course, I may be completely wrong. I've never tried to do this but from what I know about the math, this is not a trivial piece of PP work.

[asnow]

I think that Iggy is right. Your best bet is use a tilt-shift lens (very expensive). Anyway I took my best shot at it with my limit knowledge of Lightroom 3 and Photoshop and this is what I came up with. This is not easy, as you can see I couldn't get rid of the slight bow on the edges. Oh well I guess we better leave it up to the PP experts.

[Andrew]

Try the easy way first. Just an opinion but for the best appearance, the vertical lines should be equadistance from the center of the lens and on the same distance plane. This shot is off to the side so the result will be skewed. Your right side bends left and the left side bends right. It's a result of parallax. To improve the shot I believe you need to be taking your photo from the dead center of the front doors and shooting exactly perpendicular to the church. Try it and compare. At that range with a wide lens you will still get some pincushion distortion but it will be less noticeable if both sides are the same. Other than that you'll need the tilt-shift capability for architectural photography. Before the new tilt-shift lenses we used bellows. A very short one just long enough to tilt the lens without getting much of the macro effect. If memory serves me right we (junior high) built it.

[edbayani11]

after opening the image, make the image smaller a bit by pressing ctrl -, then select all by pressing ctrl A, then press ctrl T for free transform. then press ctrl, shift, alt and pull the top right corner until the sides are parallel to the side frames. this will be distorted a little by looking shorter than usual, without pressing anything pull the top up a bit to elongate the image. press enter, deselect and save.

[Richard]

This is where I get to with the lens correction tool in PS, you might get closer if you input your lens information?

11835

[Marko]

Good info in this thread! This is classic distortion that happens when lens plane and subject plane are not parallel. Tilt shift IS the way to go for this but the lens is about 2300.

Richard does indeed fix this the same way I would. Lens correction first. Then if more correction was needed - and I couldn't fix w/this I'd try - Edit - transform.
(I use pshop)
Hope that helps - Makro

[Bambi]

all of this information is very helpful. I took a stab at it-- does this work? I don't have PS:
11836

[edbayani11]

3/4 of the church on the left side is still leaning to the left a bit.

[Bambi]

3/4 of the church on the left side is still leaning to the left a bit.

lol, can we agree it's the builders' fault??

back to the drawing board!

[Richard]

Bambi, I think your correction is pretty good, and a big step forward from the original image.

[Bambi]

thanks Richard!