Check out this Perspective Correction Software Shootout between Luminar AI and Nik Collection’s Perspective Efex.
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Why Use Perspective Correction Software?
If you take travel photos or enjoy street photography, there’s a good chance you have photos of architecture that could use some perspective correction.
Professional architecture photographers enjoy special lenses that correct for perspective issues in-camera. Most of us won’t have those lenses with us while we’re enjoying some travel or doing a bit of street photography.
As a result, the lines on buildings in our photos tend to tilt inward, particularly with wide angle lenses.
Fortunately, we can use tools like the Perspective options in Luminar AI’s Composition AI tool or Perspective Efex as part of the Nik Collection 3.
Luminar AI’s Composition AI Tool
Luminar AI does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. In most cases, you can get great results by pushing two buttons. If that’s not enough, there are sliders to fine tune the axis of your photo horizontally, vertically and by aspect.
The one shortcoming I found with Luminar AI is that it doesn’t give any options to choose your crop after perspective correction. You get what it gives you, even if you would like to adjust it further.
When perspective correction software adjusts a photo, the result often looks like a trapezoid. You lose pixels on the edges and you can only crop inside of that shape.
Luminar AI decides for you what part of that shape you can use. So if it cuts something off to high or too low, there’s nothing you can do about it.
In terms of the Perspective Correction Software shootout, Luminar AI did very well in many cases. It was, however, slower to get a result and didn’t offer you any options once it completed.
Nik Collection 3 Perspective Efex
Perspective Efex is FAST! It gives you a result while Luminar AI is still tying it’s shoelaces to start the race.
In my view, Perspective Efex and Luminar AI are comparable as perspective correction software tools. Where Perspective Efex starts to pull ahead is with its speed and cropping options after processing.
You can make some cropping decisions in Perspective Efex that Luminar AI just doesn’t allow.
When you select the Manual Crop tool, you can see the shape of the photo that Perspective Efex created, and you can then adjust your crop within those results.
Which Perspective Correction Software Should You Use?
I’m happy with both of them as far as the perspective correction part goes. I think I’d give Perspective Efex a slight advantage, but very slight.
The differences come in speed and post-correction abilities. Nik’s Perspective Efex wins both of those.
If I owned Luminar AI (and I do), I wouldn’t worry about adding another tool, unless you truly need more control over the resulting crop. You’re going to lose some pixels on the edges with both tools. With that in mind, it’s easier to adjust the way you photograph architecture if you leave room for the crop.
Also, I think deciding between Luminar AI and Nik Collection 3 is a much larger issue than just using them for perspective correction software. Each has a plethora of additional tools.
If you need the speed and post-correction abilities, I’d get Nik Collection 3 (and I did). It’s a wonderful tool with a few more options available to you.
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If you buy using my Luminar promo code, you qualify to get my Luminar AI Elements course for free! Details to claim your free course are below.
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If you would like to learn more, click here to visit my Luminar AI Review.
Video Transcript
If you do travel or street photography, chances are, you've had some opportunities where you've taken photographs of buildings and you get back and look at them and they're just not quite right. The Perspective is off. That's where you're going to need to use some Perspective correction software. And we're going to take a look at two head-to-head. We're going to look at the Perspective controls inside of Luminar AI and Perspective Efex inside of the Nik collection in this video.
Hi, my name is William Beem, I'm a photographer in central Florida. I've done a lot of travel photography and I've got a lot of photos of buildings that aren't quite the way they seemed when I was there in person. And that's a common thing. You go out with your lens, you're kind of walking around. It may not be exactly an architectural lens.
It may not be a tilt shift lens. You're probably just walking around with something to capture things, but you still want to get good results. You can do that with Perspective tools. And today we're going to do a head-to-head look at the Perspective tools inside of Luminar AI and Perspective Efex. We're not going to go dive deep. It's not a product review.
This is kind of looking at what do the automatic settings and the simple sliders do in each one. If you want to get in and get out quick, that's what we're going to be taking a look at to see which one works best for us. So with that in mind, let's go ahead and take a look at our first photo. Okay, I'm going to start off with this building and we're going to start with Luminar AI on each photo,
and then we're going to start off with Perspective Efex after that. I'm going to go over here to edit in Luminar AI and notice that for each of these photos, the way Lightroom works, it's going to go ahead and toss out a TIF basically, and you don't have an option for the original. You can come over here and choose different types.
I'm going to stick with what it offers as a TIF. That's going to be important when we start working with Perspective AI, because some of the features inside of there want to use the original raw file or else they won't work. And I'll show you what that looks like. Okay. So we're inside of Luminar AI. You can see over here, we're going to go over to the edit mode and there's a couple of things we can do.
We can take a look at composition and also down here in the professionals, we can look at optics. I'm going to click on optics first, and we're going to look at our lens distortion. There's a check box here for Defringe, and we can try and see if we've got any lens distortion to correct. And I think on this one, There's a little bit of bowing and that just kind of took it out of the way.
So let's say that's good. And we're going to go back over here now to our composition AI and find our Perspective. And there's really a couple of controls. You've got these two little boxes over here that automatically do things for you. And there's some sliders that you can work on your own. So let's start off with the built-in tools. So that kind of gives us our horizontal Perspective.
Now let's take a look at our vertical Perspective. And that's it. One of the things that you would expect when you're using tools like this is that you're going to lose some pixels on the outside edge. So if you notice down here at the bottom, there was a little bit of the street, and now it's just kind of right up on the curb and you can see that it's not quite level here.
You can see the street over here. Then again, this is in an old area Havana. It could be that the curb is not quite level either. But when I'm looking at the arches and columns overall, I think it's done a very good job of correcting the Perspective. What I want to see is how this compares. Now, some of the things I'm looking at are on this crop line over here,
and I'm seeing a little bit of difference between for this column. I'm seeing a little bit difference with the width here and the width over here, and maybe not quite a hundred percent level at the top. I'm going to tilt this just a bit. And that's about the amount of room you have to do your cropping, as you can see the crop handles over here,
but the rest of the photo is cut off. There's not a lot of room for us to play around here. And that little bit of correction I did up here at the top may not be exactly what we want over here. And it's just kind of like using these little crosshairs and this grid pattern to determine where is the right spot. I'm looking at the lines along this area right now,
and I think that'll do for us. So with that, I'm going to hit enter to accept the crop. And I'm going to click apply to send us back to Lightroom. Then we'll go ahead and take a look at Perspective Efex. All right. So we have our TIF over here from Luminar. This is our original. Before I go into Perspective Efex,
I'm going to make this a little bit larger, cause I need to get a bit of information and I need to know the file name. So I'm going to copy that. And once we get inside, I'll show you why I needed that information. So we'll go here to edit in Perspective Efex. Edit with our TIF file. All right. So this is the user interface for Perspective Efex.
We corrected some distortion in Luminar AI, and I wanted to do the same thing here, but the difference is you can't do it from a TIF file. You need to have the original file, as you can see this message over here shows. So in order to do that, I can click on auto, but it's going to say, we need the original image and it'll tell you why I need that.
And it gives you a bit more information, but we're just going to go ahead and say open. And it's going to look for the folder where you got your file. And what I want to do is come over here to search, click paste. That's the file name and travel. And this is the raw file. It can't do the distortion correction from the TIFF that we created inside of Lightroom and must have the raw file.
So not it has that, it's done its distortion correction. So what we want to do next is come down here to Perspective and you can see there's a number of controls, but again, on this little head-to-head, we're just using the auto. So go ahead and click auto on there. And we've got a result, and quite honestly, this one looks a little bit different.
You can see we've gotten much more room on the bottom end. You can see the street leading up and you can see our horizon on the top looks very level. I don't honestly, I don't think there's anything else I want to do to this. So I'm going to go ahead and click save. So let's take a look at the two of these side-by-side. All right.
So you can see over here on the right-hand side where we don't have much room in the street, this is the one we did in Luminar AI. And over on the left-hand side, we've got a little bit more of the street. This is the one that we did in Nik Perspective Efex. As far as the overall crop, I can see that there's much more room on the top,
over here and less room on the bottom, down here and vice versa on the Nik side. The overall Perspective control. I kind of like what I see on the Nik side better. I liked the way it cropped the photo better, but I wouldn't throw away this one over here. I think I've still got a little bit of a slant, which is something that you could correct inside of Luminar AI.
Whereas the building is running from this way and pushing back a little bit further on this side. Not much, but just a little bit, whereas I don't have any corrections that I want to manually do over here on the Nik effect side. So I would give a slight edge on this one to Nik. All right, let's go ahead and take a look at another photo. On this photo.
You can see, we've got a lot of foreground room over here on the bottom. We've got our towers that are leaning slightly inward. I'm not going to do any distortion correction on this photo with either tool. We're just going to go ahead and solely do the Perspective controls. So here is our horizontal, and then here's our upright. Go ahead and accept this crop because it's really not leaving us any room to do anything else.
I, one of the things I don't like about the crop is again with Luminar. It tends to pull off a lot of the bottom. So this guy's feet are cut off. It's it's a little nit, but it's just something that I think this is not quite a hundred percent upright. I think it did a very good job over here on this side,
on this one, I think that's still leaning out just a little bit and maybe that is a distortion correction that we could make, but I wanted to see how just the Perspective controls work. Overall. It's much better than the original. So I think I'm happy with that. Let's go ahead and click apply. Go back to Lightroom and then we'll pick the same photo for Perspective Efex. In this case,
we're just going to go on over here to Perspective like auto and we've got a different result. I think that as far as correcting the leaning towers, it's done a much better job. We've got more room in the foreground over here. We've cut off the cross up here. And I don't know that I've got that much room. Well, lets' go here instead of doing an auto crop.
Let's see if there's anything that we can work with. And this is the thing that I like about Perspective Efex that we don't see inside of Luminar AI is that it will show you how it kind of warps the photo to make the Perspective corrections. And the reason it's selected this crop is because down here, that's the bottom where this little part is being warped in.
I think we can probably move this up a little bit. So we don't cut off the man's feet and we still get the crosses on top. And I'm going to apply that. It's a bit tight up there. We might've been able to work something else out if we were willing to take off the side of the building. But overall, I think I get a better result now with Nik,
because it'll allow me to work with the crop. Whereas Luminar AI, you get a very limited display. So over here, since we can work with a crop tool and we can see the distortion of how it put things together, it gives you more choices, I think, to put together your final result. So let's save that and we'll take a look at one more photo.
All right, I'm looking at this. You can see we've got some very drastic diagonal lines going on over here. And there's a bit of an arch back in here and a bit of a dome up at the top. So this is going to be one of the more difficult ones to do. And I'm curious to see what we end up getting. I'm trying to decide if I want to do any distortion correction on this or not.
Let's take a look and see what we get before. Okay. We'll take a look on this side. I think I'm gonna use that as a little bit of distortion correction here, which means I'll end up doing the same thing in next. So let's go to composition. Let's take a look at our Perspective and this is kind of what I was talking about with the crop.
We're in basically the crop tool with Composition AI, but I don't have much more than I can work with. In other words, there was a lot down here at the bottom that we're not seeing any more after it's done its correction. However, look at the lines on these columns. The lines are straight up and down, and this is an interesting choice up here because that's going into a dome.
It's a difficult thing to try and do for Perspective correction. But as far as the Perspective of these columns and the doors over here, and these arches on each side, I think it's done a great job. I would not have cropped it. If it were up to me and I still had the room, otherwise I would not have cropped it down here.
Luminar AI didn't really give me a choice with that. All right, let's do our distortion. Remember we have to put in access to the original file and there's this one over here. So we'll open. That gives us our distortion correction, and now let's try our Perspective And this one, I think I like better simply for what we can do with the crop.
We've noticed we've got a lot of space down here. You can see the step up. You can get into the seal. There was little protrusion over here. And the other one, when we'd do our side by side, I'll take a look. And we're not seeing quite as much of the ceiling. We're getting more of, I think almost an eye level view in here.
Columns are straight. I'm liking this one very much. If we were to take a look at the crop, this is what happened to the photo when it did the Perspective correction. So all that data and information is still there. We simply cropped it out because as we expand this, we can't go beyond the width of what we have down here. And this is the view that I'm seeing inside of Nik's Perspective Efex that we're not getting inside of Luminar AI.
And it gives you a few more choices. I, I kinda like that. So let's go ahead and apply this. And we'll take a look at our side by side. So now we can see our two views over here on the right. This is the one done by Luminar AI. If you can remember by the fact that we did not get the bottom of this little opening right here and on the left,
this is the one done by Nik Perspective Efex. You could have gotten this view, the same kind of crop with Nik, because it gave you the option to see how the Perspective corrections changed everything. And you could have moved that crop up. With Luminar AI, you didn't have a choice. What it gave you is what you got. So you didn't really have a choice if you wanted to move it up to this level or not.
And maybe see more of the dome. With Nik, we could have done that, but I stuck with what it gave us. Now, another thing is the look over here. We've got this. I don't know if this is a light or a camera, but there's a little protrusion over there. We could probably go ahead and clean that up. If we wanted to,
with clone and stamp or a healing brush, it was cropped out over here. It's still in the photograph. It was cropped out. So we've got a much tighter crop on the sides using Nik. And then we did over here. And I think that's just simply a choice. The difference is with Nik, we could have made the same choice as this.
We could have raised it up a little bit. Maybe gotten a little bit wider, but that's the difference. And I think as far as doing the Perspective correction, both are doing a great job. The columns are straight over here. The columns are straight over here. I'd say this one might be bowing just a little bit. I think overall Nik did a slightly better job,
but what I really like about Nik is the fact that it gave me the choice to alter the crop after the fact and Luminar AI did not. So that is a quick look at our head to head comparison of Perspective correction tools in Luminar AI versus the Nik collection Perspective Efex. Let me know in the comments below. Which one did you prefer? Do you like the one that Luminar just kind of gets in and gets out and everything's done?
Or do you want to fiddle around with things a bit more with some of the controls that were inside of Perspective Efex? We didn't go too deep into the controls in Perspective Efex or even on the sliders that were available in Luminar. I just really wanted to take a look at what the automatic controls were. I'm kind of doing this as a head-to-head comparison of quickly going in,
correcting your Perspective and then getting out. So tell me what you prefer. If you like this video, please go ahead. Click the like button. That lets YouTube know if we're doing something right. And then subscribe. You'll see more videos, click the little bell notification icon. So you get a notice the next time I put one out. Thank you so much.
We'll see you again in the next video.