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ImageAlign from Grasshopper Software is a tool designed to correct camera tilt and lens perspective distortions such as pincusion and barrel distortion. Available as either a Photoshop plug-in or a standalone product in it's Professional versions. The Professional Edition also handles 16 bit files when using a Photoshop CS plug-in. The Professional version also has no file size limit, whereas the Home Edition limits you to 5mbs, and lacks pincusion and barrel distortion correction.

ImageAlign is a digital chiropractor for your images. Fisheye shooters and wide angle photographers will find this product a "must have". It is quick to process, easy to operate, renders quality output and is relatively inexpensive for what it does. When opened in Photoshop, you are presented with a console that displays your original image and a set of sliders that control barrel correction, pincushion correction, rotation, vertical perspective, horizontal perspective, vertical skew, horizontal skew and rescaling. There are also provisions for zooming, before and after, grid enabling and a button for a larger preview. All adjustments are rendered in real time with no requirement for lens specific modules. This is a very nifty product with a simple and effective interface.

ImageAlign Interface

Example

Here is an example of ImageAlign at work. The original image was taken with a 15mm fisheye lens. The second image is corrected using ImageAlign. Note that in severe corrections such as this, some of the image is cropped as the original image is "distorted" to correct the perspective.

Original Image

Corrected Image

More Thoughts

As you probably already surmise, ImageAlign not only has the ability to correct large distortions, but also minor tweaking as well. This is all done via the simple wysiwyg interface. There are no restrictions for camera or lens combinations. All in all, ImageAlign is one of the more useful software products I've had the pleasure of using. Simple and effective...reasonably priced. You can get more information and download a trial version of this highly recommended product by clicking on the icon below.