Canon’s Digital Photo Profession lens aberration correction
If you’re a Canon EOS shooter, it’s well worth your effort to download Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 3.2 (click on Drivers/Software).
Of particular interest is the correction for color fringing (long found in Nikon’s Capture software). Other features include correction of vignetting and distortion and “color blur”. Fully correcting vignetting tends to look unnatural with some images, so correcting it somewhat less than 100% might be advisable. Distortion correction naturally loses some angular coverage as well as decreasing sharpness (in essence, image pixels must be resampled and stretched to fit).
Canon’s chromatic aberration correction is highly effective (see below), but unavailable unless it is a “supported” camera/lens combination. Since Nikon’s Capture can operate on files created by any Nikon digital camera and any lens from any manufacturer (see Nikon Capture’s Color Aberration Control), this is disappointing to say the least, especially since one such “unsupported” combination is the Canon EOS 5D and the newly-introduced EF 16-35 f/2.8L II! Ditto for the 14mm f/2.8L II.
Ironically the previous model EF 16-35 /2.8L is supported on the 5D. If it’s a matter of RAW-file data describing which lens was used, the software could provide a choice allowing the user to specify which model lens was used. “Buy a new Canon camera body that supports the new lenses” seems to be the message from Canon. I find that inexcusable, at least without a legitimate technical reason (hard to imagine, since Nikon can work the magic with any combination of camera/lens).
Please see my April 5 blog entry for background on the color fringing seen in the two Canon EF 16-35L models. Shown below is a frame taken with the EOS 5D and the original model 16-35 f/2.8L. Mouse over the image to see without/with color aberration correction from DPP 3.2. All traces of red and cyan fringing disappear, though the sharpness leaves a lot to be desired
