Does Distortion Suck?

Answer: It used to suck.

Back in film days, when your lens had distortion, your images had distortion.

Today, you can remove distortion with software and get virtually perfect results.  Unlike sharpness or chromatic aberration fix-ups, distortion is removed without adding its own artifacts.

Many people use the lens correction filter in Photoshop to remove distortion.  The problem with this approach:  you can't always tell how much distortion exists in an image.  Distortion varies by lens and focal length.  You need to use different filter settings on each shot!  That's too much work for me.

There is a more consistent and superior way to remove distortion. Use DxO Pro. This software is different.  It is not a Photoshop filter.  It is pre-processing software that fixes your image before you put into iPhoto, LightRoom - or whatever organizing software your use.

The engineers at DxO calibrate 100's of lens with the majority of leading DSLRs. They measure distortion at all focal lengths and include this matrix of values in the DxO Pro software. To correct distortion, DxO reads the camera,  lens, and focal length data that is included  in every picture taken by a modern digital camera (EXIF data).  Removing distortion only requires DxO to invert the distortion that they measured when they calibrated your lens.  Brilliant and very accurate!  Not only is it consistent, but DxO can also fix distortion that's much more complex than that which can be fixed in Photoshop.

Does distortion suck?  Only if you let it.