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Canon EOS 20D, 28-135 at 28mm. ISO100 f/8 10s


Canon EOS 20D, 28-135 at 50mm. ISO100 f/11 25s


Canon EOS 20D, 28-135 at 50mm. ISO100 f/11 30s

Big day of shooting school football yesterday but after having dinner in town, thought why not head down to the Torrens for some night shots of Adelaide. After all, already had all my gear...

C&C would be appreciated, especially on how to control uneven horizons, uneven buildings and lens distortion all in the same go...

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Hi Ronza,

I like these 3 shots. Maybe they are a little too overexposed, but it's really difficult to get the lit buildings without over exposing and without loosing all the detail in the shadows if you go the other way.

In photoshop CS2 you can use edit/transform/warp to fix up some of the uneven horizons, buildings and distortion, but you have to be careful that you don't just make it worse. In the 3rd image, maybe you could pull the hyatt building verticle with a slight warp. But if you're going to use a wide lens, you're going to get some distortion. Often it enhances the image.

For example, I like the distortion I got in this image of mine and I wouldn't try to remove it.



Cheers
John

#2 has a lovely mood to it, but I agree with John, the exposure is a little bit off. Maybe have a play with Shadows/highlight or curves, to pull the highlights down a bit and the midtones up a tad. If you shot RAW, this might be a great case to blend 2 exposures.

A great free plugin for lens distortion is PTLens. It has profiles to automatically correct barrel/pincushion distortion on many popular lenses (does a great job on my Nikkor 18-70 at its wide end), I'm not sure if that Canon lens is supported by default but definitely worth a look. It has manual controls as well, I'm just lazy and find it easy to click a button and see instant improvement. DxO optics is supposed to be better than PTLens, but you have to pay for it.

Perspective distortion (ie focal plane not parallel to subject), use Filter=>Distort=>Lens correction (assuming PS CS2). I'd try both of those before correcting any horizons