tips for correcting for wet lens distortion in editor?

[Aotus]

I have a new rig, a panasonic lx10 with nauticam housing and wide lens. It's very important that I correct the distortion from the lens, because my images are for 3D modeling of the surfaces I'll be shooting. I use On1 Raw 2018 for image processing, and there is a function to create my own custom setting for the lens and position. I contacted Nauticam to see if they might have some advice about settings to dial that in, but they had none. I was thinking I could maybe some kind of tablet with a grid on it, take it to a pool, and shoot it at different zooms and then eyeball the settings in my editor to correct distortion in the grid, then save as custom settings to use in my project. Does this sound good? Are there better approaches.

Thanks very much for any tips.

 

[Chris Ross]

There should be distortion correction available in the Raw converter, the standard way to correct it would be to shoot a grid in a pool and make the grid straight with the controls provided. You should be able to save that as a preset. A further complication is that distortion may vary with focal length as you zoom. You may want to consider picking a focal length and staying with it if possible if this varies enough to be a problem.

You would probably also need to square up the camera to the grid so you don't have perspective distortion on top of lens distortion if the camera is not square to the grid.

 

[Aotus]

ok. that's exactly what i was thinking, but glad to have a second voice. thanks. I'll probably shoot at a few focal lengths and save each as a preset for that position. good tip about mitigating perspective distortion.

thanks.