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The Sports Photo Guy |
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Wide Angle Substitute?
Tokina 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 AT-X AF DX Fisheye
PTLens has for years been an excellent tool for correcting common distortion in a variety of lenses. The most recent version has also offered fisheye-to-rectilinear conversion. First offered by Nikon for the 10.5mm DX fisheye, this feature allows fisheye lenses to be pressed into service as wide angle, rectilinear lens substitutes. Though much of the fisheye's angle of view is lost in the process, the extreme distortion of fisheye lenses corrects remarkably well. The following samples show PTLens applied to shots from the Tokina 10-17 fisheye zoom. In each case, the "best" shot in terms of sharpness and chromatic abberation were taken from my image samples pages. Prior to comparison, images were processed in the new Adobe Raw Converter v4.0 (beta) -- part of PhotoShop CS3 -- for optimum image quality. Therefore, image appearance differs substantially from those on the image samples pages.
10mm Focal Length
Quite a wide perspective in the "corrected" version, and the new ACR highlight and fill light sliders do a masterful job of taming the wide exposure variations apt to appear in such a wide perspective. PTLens settings for this conversion: Distortion 125, Crop 19.
As noted in my examination of the sample images, image quality in the corners leaves much to be desired on the Tokina, regardless of focal length or aperture. Cropping out the far corners in the distortion correction process doesn't appear to help matters a great deal. (Below left: upper right corner of 10mm fisheye frame; below right: upper right corner of 'corrected' 10mm rectilinear frame.)
Note, however, that the center of each frame is barely affected by the correction process.
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