"Petzval" Photoshop Filter or Action?

[Jay Decker]

Has anyone encountered a Photoshop filter or action that creates a Petzval lens effect?

[Dave Aharonian]

Only once hell freezes over!!

[Mark Sawyer]

Has anyone encountered a Photoshop filter or action that creates a Petzval lens effect?

God, I hope not...

Then again, we may somerday find that all the old-lens-gurus here were really 14-year-old kids who'd been fuzzing up their cell-phone pictures in Photoshop... :rolleyes:

[Jay Decker]

... Then again, we may somerday find that all the old-lens-gurus here were really 14-year-old kids who'd been fuzzing up their cell-phone pictures in Photoshop... :rolleyes:

I've had the same thought... I've never met Jim Galli, but it would be funny if "he" turned out to an adolescent girl with a pierced tongue who likes the SciFi channel and getting middle aged men all lathered up about Petzval's and Heliar's...

[Gordon Moat]

You could fake it in a few steps, though it would likely look very obvious. The issue with 2D defocus post production is that it cannot replicate a 3D defocus effect. The distance of objects from foreground to background is rendered differently by a lens at a location, with some further objects more defocused, and closer objects less so. When you try that in PhotoShop, the software treats all objects as being at the same distance relative to the plane of focus and each other. The only work-around is to ensure that all objects in an image that will undergo defocus style post processing, is to make sure the original capture contains all elements at the same plane and orientation. It might work okay for portraits, but even then the closer the portrait (like head shots), then the more unnatural a manipulated result will become. There is absolutely no software solution to this, beyond making your images in 3D software and not using a camera at all, but then that's not photography.

The reason for using these lenses is exactly the uniqueness of the defocus effects. While they may not be user friendly, and they might only be adaptable to a few cameras, I am certainly glad that the uniqueness cannot be matched with post processing. I have nearly 15 years of PhotoShop experience (professionally), yet I have no desire to use software when a lens and camera set-up will allow better results in-camera.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography (http://www.gordonmoat.com)

[Ben Syverson]

I'm an image processing engineer by trade... I did a test recently to simulate a "bad" lens digitally. It involved firing a virtual "laser" through a 3D model of a meniscus lens, and raytracing the caustics it produced. The "laser" traveled back and forth in scanlines like an old CRT, saving a frame for every pixel (over 16,000 of them). Then I wrote software to go through every pixel of a reference image, pull up the associated raytrace for that pixel, multiply it by the input pixel, and add it to the buffer.

It's a slow process, but it can produce images that "accurately" model coma and other lens aberrations as opposed to merely faking them. Attached are three images. The first is a side view of a simple lens in 3D. The second is a test render from the software. The third is the input image before cropping. This particular virtual lens is particularly rough -- I'd like to do one that's "cleaner."

However, the entire process is like a copy camera. In other words, the virtual lens is locked at one point of focus -- there's no way for something to be "out of focus" or beyond the DOF. You could do it by dynamically rendering the caustics for every pixel, but it would take many many hours for one 256x256 pixel image. You could do it by having a library of caustics for different depths, which would render faster, but for 256x256 it would occupy many gigabytes. Either way, you would need an accurate depth map in addition to the color reference image.

In other words, the answer to your question is "no." If you want an image that looks like it was shot with a petzval, by FAR the least painful option is to... shoot with a petzval.

[Jay Decker]

I'm an image processing engineer by trade... I did a test recently to simulate a "bad" lens digitally. It involved firing a virtual "laser" through a 3D model of a meniscus lens, and raytracing the caustics it produced. The "laser" traveled back and forth in scanlines like an old CRT, saving a frame for every pixel (over 16,000 of them). Then I wrote software to go through every pixel of a reference image, pull up the associated raytrace for that pixel, multiply it by the input pixel, and add it to the buffer.

It's a slow process, but it can produce images that "accurately" model coma and other lens aberrations as opposed to merely faking them. Attached are three images. The first is a side view of a simple lens in 3D. The second is a test render from the software. The third is the input image before cropping. This particular virtual lens is particularly rough -- I'd like to do one that's "cleaner."

However, the entire process is like a copy camera. In other words, the virtual lens is locked at one point of focus -- there's no way for something to be "out of focus" or beyond the DOF. You could do it by dynamically rendering the caustics for every pixel, but it would take many many hours for one 256x256 pixel image. You could do it by having a library of caustics for different depths, which would render faster, but for 256x256 it would occupy many gigabytes. Either way, you would need an accurate depth map in addition to the color reference image.

In other words, the answer to your question is "no." If you want an image that looks like it was shot with a petzval, by FAR the least painful option is to... shoot with a petzval.


Fascinating! Thank you for taking the time respond. I suspected that was the answer, but did not know what it would take to digitally create such a rendering.

[Jim Galli]

Damn! My cover blown again. Now I'll have to call off the *LGM's. OOPS they just brought me one of those little Gundlachs (http://tonopahpictures.0catch.com/4InchGundlachPetzval4X5Pics.html) to sell. No more boys no more! $95 for the Gundlach if you're still a believer.

*little green men

[Ben Syverson]

If I ever eventually commercialized my software as a plugin, there's no way I'd be able to sell it for less than $250. So buy a $95 petzval from Jim instead!

[Brian Ellis]

You could fake it in a few steps, though it would likely look very obvious. The issue with 2D defocus post production is that it cannot replicate a 3D defocus effect. The distance of objects from foreground to background is rendered differently by a lens at a location, with some further objects more defocused, and closer objects less so. When you try that in PhotoShop, the software treats all objects as being at the same distance relative to the plane of focus and each other. . . .



Actually by use of the gradient tool to create a transition mask and then Filter > Blur > Lens Blur you can replicate the way a camera renders blur in Photoshop. I haven't done it myself but I've seen it demonstrated in a Photoshop tutorial and it appeared to work well in the sense that near objects were relatively sharp and then other objects got progressively less sharp as they got farther away. You perhaps already know of this method and know that it often doesn't work for some reason but in the demonstration I saw it appeared to work pretty well. I have no idea whether it duplicates a Petzval effect since I don't know what that effect is. But it did appear to generally produce an effect similar to the effect produced by a lens with respect to nearer and farther out of focus objects.

[domaz]

Actually by use of the gradient tool to create a transition mask and then Filter > Blur > Lens Blur you can replicate the way a camera renders blur in Photoshop. I haven't done it myself but I've seen it demonstrated in a Photoshop tutorial and it appeared to work well in the sense that near objects were relatively sharp and then other objects got progressively less sharp as they got farther away. You perhaps already know of this method and know that it often doesn't work for some reason but in the demonstration I saw it appeared to work pretty well. I have no idea whether it duplicates a Petzval effect since I don't know what that effect is. But it did appear to generally produce an effect similar to the effect produced by a lens with respect to nearer and farther out of focus objects.

There is no way photoshop knows what the near and far objects in a picture are. The Lens Blur filter may get lucky in certain scenes and render a believable result, but not in others.

[Gordon Moat]

Hello Brian,

I am very familiar with the technique in PhotoShop that you mentioned. Perhaps my explanation is not making sense, or my choice of terms is too confusing.

Let us suppose someone is photographing an urban scene, with several bulidings. Some objects/structures in the scene are 10m closer, others 20m or more farther than the plane of sharpest focus. Using whatever defocus method I might with a view camera, or large aperture lens on another camera, the plane of focus will be sharp, with any objects away from that plane being defocused. The amount of defocus varies in the frame from slightly defocused for objects at a distance nearer the plane of sharpest focus. Those objects farther (physically in the scene) from the plane of sharpest focus will appear even more defocused. Also, objects closer to the camera will have a different defocus rendering (in-camera) than objects farther from the camera and farther from the plane of focus, though this effect depends upon how the lens renders the scene.

Compare this to trying to replicate this in software. There is no way in PhotoShop to tell the filter that one object is 10m away from the camera, and another is 50m away from the camera (Note: distances randomly chosen by me to illustrate this point). PhotoShop will treat an object, in the scene, as being exactly the same distance as any other object within that scene. To be very fair in this, the average viewer would likely not know the difference between software defocus and in-camera defocus rendering; and many would find the software manipulated image acceptable.

Just to use another example, suppose you photographed a fence at an angle to the camera. Let us suppose the farther end of the fence is on the left of the frame, and the closer end is on the right. Then let us suppose that we choose our plane of focus to be near the Golden Section line, with the rest becoming defocused. The part of the fence closer to us, closer to the plane of focus, and to the right side of our image, will be less defocused than the farther fence posts that fall upon the left side of our scene. Suppose I took another shot, but at a smaller aperture, and then nearly all the fence was in focus (or I could have used swing to get all the fence in focus). To get this second full focus shot to look like the selective focus shot, I would start by blurring the image where I remembered my point of focus. Then I could do many different methods to refine that blur, like creating a mask that would fade the effect a bit over the length of the fence. Quite likely I could create a convincing software rendering of the second image that is near the original selective focus shot done in-camera; the problem is that I would know the difference when viewing a print of either image, and many creative professionals and photographers I know would also be able to tell the difference; that's a problem when you do this for a living, which many others will find unacceptable.

PhotoShop is a wonderful tool, and I have nearly 15 years using it on a daily basis. I know what many cameras and lenses can do, and have shot wide open aperture on numerous cameras and various lenses (including large format wide open). Yes, you can try to fake it, and maybe be happy with the software result, but I guarantee you someone will spot the PhotoShop, and their opinion of the image will be decreased. Yes, you can fake defocus, and fool many many people, but sooner or later you will run into someone who knows exactly what manipulation was done to the image. In my opinion, when you take away the magic of an image, you have diminished it's value.

I hope I have explained this better. It is the various distances of objects in a scene that alters the effects of defocus rendering. Software cannot know all those distances. To tie this into the Petzval type lenses, many of those defocus along a curved plane of focus, which further complicates trying to replicate the look in software.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography (http://www.gordonmoat.com)

[Ben Syverson]

The "Lens Blur" effect mimics the center portion of a perfect apochromatic copy lens. Any real lens, especially a Petzval, will progressively deteriorate toward the edge of the frame. By the very edge, you're looking at swirl (coma), falloff, mechanical vignetting, and a million intangibles.

Throwing Lens Blur on the background based on a gradient will look exactly like what it is: fake. Google "fake tilt shift" to get a sense of what this looks like--
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2077/2178263163_5a9f737fae.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/markus941/2178263163/)

[Sylvester Graham]

Not a substitution, but you can fool the suckers by rocking dual layers of radial blur, each masked and painted out to reveal whatever sharpness you want. I tried it once farting around, below, but won't admit to pawning it off anywhere. In any case it kind of looks old.

-Alex

[Ben Syverson]

Not a substitution, but you can fool the suckers by rocking dual layers of radial blur
You can always fool suckers, but to me... looks like a radial blur. You would at least want to do a Lens Blur before the radial using a radial gradient as the mask. Along with a little vignetting.

It's like when people add fake 4x5 black borders to their point and shoot pictures. To each his own, but this kind of thing has always struck me as tacky at best and disingenuous at worst.

[Donald Miller]

With the proper use of selections, masking, gradients and differing blurs you can certainly mimic what I have seen here made with the old lenses. How does it stack up against the real thing? I don't know because I have not seen the real thing up close and personal. I suspect that judicious use of the available tools will get you very, very close. I don't see this as a plug-in that someone will run in Photoshop...it would seem to be a one-off effort.

[Brian Ellis]

Thanks for the various responses. Gordon, I do understand planes of focus, circles of confusion, the effect of distance from the plane of focus on the size of the circles of confusion and hence on the degree of "defocus." To others who responded by saying Photoshop couldn't "know" how far away various objects were, Photoshop doesn't need to know the actual distances any more than a lens "knows" actual distances. Photoshop "knows" what I tell it about distances when I create the transition mask. And finally, and most importantly, I didn't say that one could duplicate a lens effect in Photoshop. In fact I said the opposite, that I didn't know whether the effect duplicated a Petzval lens or not. The only point of my earlier message was to question Gordon's statement that Photoshop can't replicate the gradual increase in the "defocus" areas that takes place with a lens as objects in the scene become more distant.

I've attached two photographs. The one on the left is the original (revised to meet the size requirements of this forum), in which everything from the front to the top of the hill is pretty much sharp. The second shows the use of a transition mask to make a gradual transition from sharp to unsharp. I don't know how obvious the transition will be given the file size needed to post photographs here but in the originals on my monitor it's very obvious that the "defocus" area begins approximately an inch up from the bottom of the screen and gradually becomes more "defocused" as the distance from the bottom of the screen increases up to the top of the hill in the background.

Just in case it needs repeating - I don't claim that the photograph on the right duplicates the image that would have been made by a lens focused at the near and opened up, only that it's possible to create a gradual transition from "sharp" to "unsharpest" in Photoshop similar to what would have been done with a len. And with a little more time and effort, mainly by spending more time and experimenting with different transition masks, I think the effect can be pretty close.

[Don7x17]

Thanks for the various responses. Gordon, I do understand planes of focus, circles of confusion, the effect of distance from the plane of focus on the size of the circles of confusion and hence on the degree of "defocus." To others who responded by saying Photoshop couldn't "know" how far away various objects were, Photoshop doesn't need to know the actual distances any more than a lens "knows" actual distances. Photoshop "knows" what I tell it about distances when I create the transition mask. And finally, and most importantly, I didn't say that one could duplicate a lens effect in Photoshop. In fact I said the opposite, that I didn't know whether the effect duplicated a Petzval lens or not. The only point of my earlier message was to question Gordon's statement that Photoshop can't replicate the gradual increase in the "defocus" areas that takes place with a lens as objects in the scene become more distant.

I've attached two photographs. The one on the left is the original (revised to meet the size requirements of this forum), in which everything from the front to the top of the hill is pretty much sharp. The second shows the use of a transition mask to make a gradual transition from sharp to unsharp. I don't know how obvious the transition will be given the file size needed to post photographs here but in the originals on my monitor it's very obvious that the "defocus" area begins approximately an inch up from the bottom of the screen and gradually becomes more "defocused" as the distance from the bottom of the screen increases up to the top of the hill in the background.

Just in case it needs repeating - I don't claim that the photograph on the right duplicates the image that would have been made by a lens focused at the near and opened up, only that it's possible to create a gradual transition from "sharp" to "unsharpest" in Photoshop similar to what would have been done with a len. And with a little more time and effort, mainly by spending more time and experimenting with different transition masks, I think the effect can be pretty close.

interesting image of the base of Steptoe....

[Daniel_Buck]

There is no way photoshop knows what the near and far objects in a picture are. The Lens Blur filter may get lucky in certain scenes and render a believable result, but not in others.

z-depth. Photoshop doesn't handle it really good, but other compositing program do. :cool:

[Ben Syverson]

Right, but first you have to generate (or worse yet, capture) the depth map, and then you have to know what to do with it. Applying blur based on z-depth is nowhere near enough to get you to the "petzval look."

[Daniel_Buck]

Right, but first you have to generate (or worse yet, capture) the depth map, and then you have to know what to do with it. Applying blur based on z-depth is nowhere near enough to get you to the "petzval look."

Just because it's on a computer, doesn't mean it's one click easy :) But that said, photoshop is pretty limited to what it can do. A heavier compositing program is capable of doing alot more.

[Jim Galli]

Not only is it not convincingly duplicated, but consider that each petzval has a slightly different personality than the next one, the old timey ones especially are more 'petzvally' than their more modern equivalents sometimes, and that any given petzval will look different as you change formats with it. For instance an 8 1/2" Petzval used on 4X5 is quite conservative. Use it one 5X7 and you're into the edge coma far further with some exagerated fall off and softness, then put it on a 6 1/2 X 8 1/2 camera and you've got massive coma, swirls, fall-off and darkened corners, each look different from the previous.

[cowanw]

Not only is it not convincingly duplicated, but consider that each petzval has a slightly different personality than the next one, the old timey ones especially are more 'petzvally' than their more modern equivalents sometimes, and that any given petzval will look different as you change formats with it. For instance an 8 1/2" Petzval used on 4X5 is quite conservative. Use it one 5X7 and you're into the edge coma far further with some exagerated fall off and softness, then put it on a 6 1/2 X 8 1/2 camera and you've got massive coma, swirls, fall-off and darkened corners, each look different from the previous.

Which makes it easier to claim that a constructed effect is just like that petzval you have not seen;)
Regards
Bill

[Struan Gray]

I've always wondered why stereo pairs were so popular in the early days of photography. Obviously they needed the depth information so that their Difference Engines could calculate the required swirl.

FWIW, photogrammetric software will automatically generate depth maps from stereo pairs. The maths is tedious, but not hard, and computers don't get bored.

Ben: it occurs to me that you don't have to compute and store hi-res spot diagrams for all possible positions in image space - although I can see it might make sense if you are doing a lot of simulations of the same lens. The strength of aberrations tends to vary in a smooth analytic way, so I suspect you could get away with a coarse grid of values for each of the main aberrations, which you then interpolate and convert into a point spread function as needed. I suppose that when things get as ugly as with a plastic singlet the brute force approach may be more efficient though.

[goamules]

What I've learned in my experience is nothing is impossible. I've worked with space programs, telecomm, stealth, and other "miracle" programs, and we've often done what someone says cannot be. I'm no programmer, but "one day" someone will be able to duplicate most lens effects with software. I also know I want nothing to do with it.

[nathanm]

It's fascinating how much advanced technology, labor and cost it can take to simulate or reverse engineer something which occurs in the natural world for cheap. Using Photoshop tools to simulate the look of the old photographs I was inspired by was exactly what I was doing before I decided to shoot LF film. But if you just use "old" tools to start with, instantly you get 75% of what you want for almost no cost. Some things are just not worth "faking" when the real thing is just so much easier to do. I agree with goamules in that we will be able to duplicate all these things eventually which is cool and all, but dang - if you like the look of light passing through some ratty old chunk of glass then just shoot through some ratty old chunk of glass instead of using $10,000 of computer gear to muck up a photo shot through pristine glass! Like, *duh*! :D

[Kerik Kouklis]

But if you just use "old" tools to start with, instantly you get 75% of what you want for almost no cost.

And just where are these "almost no cost" Petzvals? :D

[Brian Ellis]

interesting image of the base of Steptoe....

If it was a photograph made at the base of Steptoe it would indeed be extremely interesting. : - )

[jb7]

Maybe you could adapt the program to be able to add flare, fingerprints and dust?
That'd be the whole package complete...

[Marko]

It's fascinating how much advanced technology, labor and cost it can take to simulate or reverse engineer something which occurs in the natural world for cheap. Using Photoshop tools to simulate the look of the old photographs I was inspired by was exactly what I was doing before I decided to shoot LF film. But if you just use "old" tools to start with, instantly you get 75% of what you want for almost no cost. Some things are just not worth "faking" when the real thing is just so much easier to do. I agree with goamules in that we will be able to duplicate all these things eventually which is cool and all, but dang - if you like the look of light passing through some ratty old chunk of glass then just shoot through some ratty old chunk of glass instead of using $10,000 of computer gear to muck up a photo shot through pristine glass! Like, *duh*! :D

Generally, I agree with the idea of original being better than a copy.

What I disagree with is the cost part, and I don't mean just financially. In order to "just use the old tools" or "just shoot through some ratty old chunk of glass", one needs to have the ratty old camera to hold that ratty old chunk of glass and the film holders to go with it. One needs to know how exactly to make the three work (camera, lens, film) and one needs to make a myriad other choices such as the choice of film and developer, provided that one is already familiar with either film or development and that one already has everything that's needed to properly process that film and turn it into an image. Be it wet darkroom, enlarger and whole nine yards or just the scanner.

If you already have all of those things and know how to use them, then yes, it is much cheaper to "just use them". But for people who don't have those tools and who practice a different type of photography and are equipped accordingly, but still want " the look", mimicking it in software could make more sense and would be much cheaper in the end.

Of course, this is from a perspective of someone for whom The Image is both the beginning and the end and the process is just a tool.

:)

[Ben Syverson]

A heavier compositing program is capable of doing alot more.
Right... I created one. (http://dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit2) (Two actually, but only one that's a commercial product.)

I'm 100% sure you could come close to the Petzval look. With proper physical modeling, you could even get an "accurate" depiction of what a 3D scene would look like through a petzval.

But it would never be simple or automated enough to be a Photoshop plugin or action, which was the original poster's question. So the answer is still "NO."

[nathanm]

Marko, I agree that any process requires skills to achieve what you want, but what I mean is that digitally recreating an analog process which 'just happens' requires an enormous amount of high tech goodies.

Take painting for instance; imagine you are a primitive man in the woods and you take a lock of hair from a recently killed animal, form a crude brush, dunk it in a puddle of blood and start stroking a lovely scene of the hunt on the cave wall. Fast forward to today and now your artistic goal is to recreate the "look" of that same painting on a piece of paper using computers, software and inkjet printers. Well, to get there from here digitally we had to invent an enormous chain of technology stretching out for hundreds of years with extremely smart people coming up with ways of simulating those brush stokes on a quasi-atomic or pixel level. That's what blows my mind, how much work it takes to make a duplicate of one medium in another. Because today you can still go out in the woods and lop off a bit of your hair, make a crude brush, and paint a swell scene without eons of technological advancement. But doing that with Photoshop or Painter and a pen tablet represents a quantum leap of advancement in tools.

Or how about puppets: Take a bit of fabric, do a voice and you've got a character. Now try making an animated 3D model of that same puppet and you're looking at a mountain of tech.

[Daniel_Buck]

With proper physical modeling, you could even get an "accurate" depiction of what a 3D scene would look like through a petzval.

this is something I've done at work, to get certain looks to 3d renders. I've never thought of trying a petzval design, I think I want to try that now :)

[Ben Syverson]

this is something I've done at work, to get certain looks to 3d renders. I've never thought of trying a petzval design, I think I want to try that now :)
I'd be curious to see what you came up with.

And not to beat a dead horse, but you're talking about 3D scenes, not arbitrary 2D photos, which is the subject of this thread.

[Daniel_Buck]

I'd be curious to see what you came up with.

And not to beat a dead horse, but you're talking about 3D scenes, not arbitrary 2D photos, which is the subject of this thread.

yea, that's true

[Marko]

Marko, I agree that any process requires skills to achieve what you want, but what I mean is that digitally recreating an analog process which 'just happens' requires an enormous amount of high tech goodies.

Take painting for instance; imagine you are a primitive man in the woods and you take a lock of hair from a recently killed animal, form a crude brush, dunk it in a puddle of blood and start stroking a lovely scene of the hunt on the cave wall. Fast forward to today and now your artistic goal is to recreate the "look" of that same painting on a piece of paper using computers, software and inkjet printers. Well, to get there from here digitally we had to invent an enormous chain of technology stretching out for hundreds of years with extremely smart people coming up with ways of simulating those brush stokes on a quasi-atomic or pixel level. That's what blows my mind, how much work it takes to make a duplicate of one medium in another. Because today you can still go out in the woods and lop off a bit of your hair, make a crude brush, and paint a swell scene without eons of technological advancement. But doing that with Photoshop or Painter and a pen tablet represents a quantum leap of advancement in tools.

Or how about puppets: Take a bit of fabric, do a voice and you've got a character. Now try making an animated 3D model of that same puppet and you're looking at a mountain of tech.

Nathan, I said I agree with you, on principle, didn't I? Well, I still do, in principle. :)

Comparing the ease of a primitive act of painting on the cave wall to the complexity of using computers makes sense only in the context of our daily lives.

To a contemporary urban dweller, taking a lock of hair from a recently killed animal, on the other hand, simple and low tech act as it is, would present an almost insurmountable train of challenges and associated costs.

On the other hand, we already have computers and the skills to use them, all we need is a piece of software, which shouldn't cost all that much provided that enough people want it.

What really blows my mind in all this is how far we have gone from the days of living in caves. If we wanted to return to that lifestyle, we would need to develop not just a whole different skill set and obtain requisite physical shape, we would above all need to acquire a whole different mindset. Well, some of us anyway... :D

[Gordon Moat]

What I've learned in my experience is nothing is impossible. I've worked with space programs, telecomm, stealth, and other "miracle" programs, and we've often done what someone says cannot be. I'm no programmer, but "one day" someone will be able to duplicate most lens effects with software. I also know I want nothing to do with it.

Nikon and others have lens modeling software, which works by altering known design parameters and remapping a capture. There is also third party software for this, to cover other than Nikon lenses, though I do not immediately recall the name.

I do recall an article about a college project of a multi focus point camera and lens. Basically everything was defocused, but there was enough information recorded to select a sharp plane of focus anywhere within the image. I want to say that was done at Stanford, but it may have been MIT; anyone remember that? I think the project involved a modified Contax 645.

In theory all you would need would be a big enough imaging chip, and a fisheye lens, and you could photograph anything. Exposure on better fisheye lenses is even across the frame, so only the distortion needs to be remapped into a rectilinear lens.

Anyway, about all you can do with Photoshop is get close. You will fool lots of people if you put enough effort into faking it. Then some smart a$$ like me will come along and spot the manipulation in your print, and rag on you for it. It's your choice.
:cool: :D

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography (http://www.gordonmoat.com)

[Lars Daniel]

Too few images in this thread ;-)

Just for fun: How does this one come across to you in terms of petzvalishness:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4108/4963606578_aabd5f1b58_b.jpg

[eddie]

Too few images in this thread ;-)

Just for fun: How does this one come across to you in terms of petzvalishness:


not close. here is what a real petzval with major swirl looks like......

wet plate collodion on 5x7

[Kirk Gittings]

not close. here is what a real petzval with major swirl looks like......

wet plate collodion on 5x7

That reminds me of some things I saw in the 60'S.........

[Mike Anderson]

Nikon and others have lens modeling software, which works by altering known design parameters and remapping a capture. There is also third party software for this, to cover other than Nikon lenses, though I do not immediately recall the name.
...

DXO.com

They have modules for various popular cameras and lenses, but no Petzval modules.

...Mike

[goamules]

I decided to show the progress of software Petzval emulation after the last post 2 years ago! Seriously, a young friend that has helped me shoot photos for years had this on her website. Conclusion? A lot of youth like the retro look, but don't know what they're looking for. If you'd like to see some real Petzval shots, there are over 2,000 on the Petzval Photographs Flickr group I started back in 2008: http://www.flickr.com/groups/868027@N25/

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8024/7461020746_23bd28c394_o.jpg

[lecarp]

I've had the same thought... I've never met Jim Galli, but it would be funny if "he" turned out to an adolescent girl with a pierced tongue who likes the SciFi channel and getting middle aged men all lathered up about Petzval's and Heliar's...
Maybe the ford model T is really her mothers Taurus wagon, the letters aurus were lost in a Mall fender bender while texting.
Oooops, sorry, just noticed how old the original post was.

[Brian C. Miller]

But Garrett, you can clearly see in the picture that it's a clear-center blur filter. The ring of clarity is quite evident.

[polyglot]

And no catseyes.

[Jay Decker]

I've had the same thought... I've never met Jim Galli, but it would be funny if "he" turned out to an adolescent girl with a pierced tongue who likes the SciFi channel and getting middle aged men all lathered up about Petzval's and Heliar's...

Maybe the ford model T is really her mothers Taurus wagon, the letters aurus were lost in a Mall fender bender while texting.
Oooops, sorry, just noticed how old the original post was.

That's OK! In mean time I've met Mr. Galli, which shattered the adolescent girl image. Jim's a good man, from whom I've learned a lot... though it is kind of fun to think of him with a pierced tongue, dancing to Lady Gaga in the Nevada desert!

[Jim Galli]

That's OK! In mean time I've met Mr. Galli, which shatter the adolescent girl image. Jim's a good man, from whom I've learned a lot... though it is kind of fun to think of him with a pierced tongue, dancing to Lady Gaga in the Nevada desert!

Hey Jay! You and me man. Burning Man 2012. Better get to work on the 8X10 camera permits right away. OTOH, only 1 or 2 in 100,000 people with pierced tongues know what an 8X10 camera is. We could set up a booth with a sign that says "this wooden machine will suck out your souls" and they'd stand in line and pay our fee.

[Jay Decker]

Hey Jay! You and me man. Burning Man 2012. Better get to work on the 8X10 camera permits right away. OTOH, only 1 or 2 in 100,000 people with pierced tongues know what an 8X10 camera is. We could set up a booth with a sign that says "this wooden machine will suck out your souls" and they'd stand in line and pay our fee.

Oooh yeahhhh! I'm so there! Maybe we can get photos to post here that will put us right up there with Frank, or even, gandolfi!

[Ben Syverson]

Woah, crazy to see this old thread pop up again...

It strikes me that these days, the Lytro could be the ideal camera for a very good Petzval modeling plugin. When you have the whole light field, you can do pretty crazy things. Currently they're sort of wasting the potential, as you can only emulate a "perfect" wide aperture lens, which is a little boring. But theoretically you could use any lens design to introduce its specific "defects" and character.

They should really get on that, right after they do autofocus video

[Sylvester Graham]

Woah, crazy to see this old thread pop up again

You're telling me. I posted on this back in 2009, didn't really come back to Lfforums til last week. I see this thing floating around. Now I know there is a god.

[goamules]

You're telling me. I posted on this back in 2009, didn't really come back to Lfforums til last week. I see this thing floating around. Now I know there is a god.

The point was missed. I commented on this post, and brought it to the top, because there has been no software progress that I can tell, yet there are 100s of thousands of more youth posting pictures with their crappy "old fashioned" filters. They don't have a state of reference on the nuances of in camera legacy lens use versus software manipulation, and they don't care. It's the same human element that makes super-saturated High Def "art photography" sell at shows and galleries.

[lecarp]

Maybe if the Petzval app was priced accordingly, say starting around $1899.00 plus shipping and paypal fees.

[Sylvester Graham]

and they don't care..

No, and they especially don't care that you or I care. Instagram and hipstamatic photos communicate a message of subversion and individuality for the people who take them. I don't see a problem with that, ( except for subversion part, since Facebook bought instagram).

Besides, I have never heard anyone anywhere (outside of this forum) refer to these apps and programs looking like a 19th century view camera lens. I have however heard people refer to them as "toy camera" ish, and I think that's what the developers were going for.