On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:43:30 -0500, Peabody <>
wrote:
>Please note that I said I used a Canon A590 to take the
>pictures. So, not to shock you, but Photoshop isn't in my
>budget. Well how about Irfanview? Will it straighten and
>resample/resize properly? Or maybe XnView or Faststone?
>
Don't think less of that camera because of cost. In the hands of a talented
photographer any camera can produce excellent results. The Canon Powershots
are not to be taken lightly just because of cost. I've won several
international awards with the ones I've used.
While I've not used XnView, it does contain more advanced features, and
even includes a Lanczos resampling option for resizings. (I just checked
it. Installed it months ago to see if it's any good, but never played with
it til now.) But I'm unaware if Lanczos is used for rotations, where it is
the most needed and beneficial to have that option. There is no resampling
algorithm option on XnView's rotation tool. But it does have the crop or
no-crop options for rotations. There you could see what I was talking
about.
It sounds like XnView might be a better editor for you. GIMP being the
pinnacle of all freeware editors.
See this page for other editors you can play with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...aphics_editors
Many of them are excellent freeware and more than most people need.
If you can find an earlier version of Paint Shop Pro, v9.x or v10.x for a
few dollars (v9.x is often sold for $5, or just shared because it's so
old), it has some really nice features. Including geometric lens correction
filters (pincushion and barrel distortion correction, one of the problems
you mentioned), as well as a very good noise-removal tool and
sensor-blooming (color fringing) correction tool. I wish Photoline had that
latter one. I keep an earlier version of Paint Shop Pro installed just for
that color-fringing correction tool alone. It was implemented so well.
I just did a Google search for: plugin freeware pincushion barrel
correction
You might want to look into this link I found:
<http://wareseeker.com/Graphic-Apps/lens-correction-1.0.zip/2e711ae14> or
do that Google search for others listed. Though I've never used this plugin
it should work fine with XnView, IrfanView, etc. Very few "photoshop
plugins" are photoshop-ONLY. Most all of them work with any editor that
supports plugins. There are only a rare few specialty plugins that are
photoshop specific, and none of the freeware ones are, that I know of.
The suggested (by someone else) PTLens plugin is also excellent for lens
geometry corrections, but I never use it for that (my editor contains its
own geometry correction tools). I use PTLens for its better
chromatic-aberration (CA) correction feature. For simple pincushion and
barrel distortion correction you shouldn't have to pay for an advanced
plugin.
>By the way, I did find a freeware lossless jpeg cropper that
>crops on 8-pixel boundaries without resampling what's left,
>so there is no generational loss from the cropping. Which
>is fine so long as those boundaries are acceptable cropping
>points.
If you really get into photography, again I suggest you look into getting
Photoline someday (not bloatware PhotoShop). It's the only editor out there
that is capable of doing truly lossless JPG editing. It doesn't put the
data through the JPG algorithm again unless you specifically choose a
higher compression level than the original. The only data that is changed
in the resulting saved file are the pixels that you specifically changed.
It doesn't compound compression artifacts during multiple re-loads and
re-saves. It also is blind to those JPG 8 or 16 pixel block boundaries.
Edit to any pixel dimensions you want and it won't jump to a multiple of 8
or 16 when saved
>
>Well, at this point the pictures I've produced are far
>better than what he had, and plenty good enough for online
>use, which is what he wanted them for. If he gets to the
>point of making large prints, I would probably suggest he
>hire a pro photographer who knows what he's doing and has a
>fine camera. For what it's worth, though, I found that
>photographing the paintings outside in the shade, with
>manual white balance, produced really good results, and the
>colors, on my monitor at least, were spot on.
>
A "pro" could do no better, and might even do worse than what you could do
with your gear, when used properly. Lots of people make money, or try to
make money, with their cameras but it doesn't mean they should be allowed
to ever have a camera. If someone gives a snapshooter $0.25 for a poorly
done shot of their baby they can claim they are a "pro". Many wedding
parties get scammed daily by self-appointed "Pros". They need nothing more
than a printer for their business cards and a fancy looking camera to
impress their potential marks (victims). The world (and news-groups) are
crawling wall to wall with "Insta-Pros".
If you are not yet familiar with it, you might want to check out the
software add-on for your A590, called CHDK. It will allow your "lowly"
camera to do more than any DSLR on earth. You have more camera-power in
your hands than I think you realize.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
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