DxO is best known for DxO Optics Pro, its combined RAW conversion/lens correction program. DxO ViewPoint 2 is a kind of cut-down version designed to work as a standalone program or, more usefully, as a plug-in within Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom. It’s going to be especially useful within Aperture, which doesn’t have the distortion and perspective correction tools that the two Adobe programs have.
DxO ViewPoint version was useful but hardly a must-have. It had perspective correction tools a-plenty, but lacked the thing everyone (well, me) finds most useful in DxO Optics Pro – the automatic lens correction profiles.
But these are included in DxO ViewPoint 2, so as soon as the demo was available I downloaded and installed it, then I tried it out on a whole series of pictures that needed correction – including this one.
Clearly there’s some converging vertical (keystone) distortion and I’m not quite sure this picture’s straight, either. Let’s see what DxO ViewPoint 2 can do with it.
01 Launching from Aperture
DxO ViewPoint 2 installs as an Aperture plug-in automatically, and you start it by right-clicking on the image you want to edit and choosing Edit with Plug-in > DxO ViewPoint 2.
02 Distortion correction
Now here’s a snag straight away. In principle, DxO ViewPoint 2 should offer automatic lens corrections, but this button is greyed out in the Aperture plug-in. I thought for a while it was something I was doing wrong, but it seems this a temporary glitch that will soon be resolved.
Underneath is Volume Deformation panel. I assume this is something to do with horizontal or lateral swelling caused by wideangle lenses, but I’ll investigate this further.