How to ‘tune-up’ your Canon zoom lenses with DPP

Do your Canon zoom lenses produce colour fringing and barrel distortion? Here we explain how you can apply a ‘lens tune-up’ to your images using Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software.

Overall, a Canon lens like the EF-S 17-85mm IS USM performs well, but sometimes it can produce noticeable colour fringing in images, especially at wide-angle zoom settings both in the corners of the frame and around high-contrast edges across the image.

As with most zoom lenses, especially those with a fairly large zoom range like this, you can also expect noticeable barrel distortion in wide-angle shots and pincushion distortion at longer zoom settings.

Other common flaws in zoom lenses are vignetting (darkened corners), particularly when wide-angle zoom settings and large apertures combine.

The solution for Canon photographers is to shoot in raw quality mode and apply lens tuning to your images using the Digital Photo Professional editing program that was supplied with your camera. Here’s how to do it…

Peripheral Illumination
In the Lens Aberration Correction section of the NR/Lens/ALO tab, click Tune. Tick peripheral illumination to brighten the corners, then drag the slider left or right to reduce or increase the effect.

Chromatic aberrations
Check Chromatic Aberration to enable corrections. Drag the main slider to minimise colour fringing, concentrating on the corners. You can also adjust the red and blue sliders independently.

Distortion
Tick Distortion to reduce barrel or pincushiondistortion. For precision adjustments, it’s useful to tick the Grid checkbox. This superimposes a grid on the preview window, which acts as a guide.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Photography Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.