DxO Announces ViewPoint, We Review It

 

 

Ever try to get rid of those geometric distortions you get when you shoot wide angle or even just point up at a tall building (or any building)? Did you think your image editing software was going to make it easy? Are you alive to tell the tale?

Well, survivor, you can relax because DxO Labs has wrapped its anamorphic and keystoning technology in a sweet little package that does all that with just a click or four.

It handles anamorphic distortion (which happens when your wide angle lens just goes too far) with a single click. Keystoning isn't much more work. You just position four points on your image to show ViewPoint what's parallel to what (as in the illustration).

 

One of the four markers you position to fix keystoning

What we really like about it, though, is that ViewPoint doesn't enforce an isometric solution on your image. You can fade it back to something a little more dramatic if not quite a distorted as the original.

We worked with a beta version of the standalone and plug-in versions. The plug-in works with Photoshop CS3 and up and Lightroom 3 and 4, which is good news because the standalone version doesn't handle Raw files.

ViewPoint will be available later this month for $79.

We've got a lot of sample corrections in our gallery that show off just how well ViewPoint works. But what you can't see is how little effort and time it took. Read our review for the details.