PSP: Barrel Distortion correction in RAW.

[joe1512]

I have an RX100 and am an avid Paint Shop Pro X5 fan. However, I have had no real success in shooting in RAW format. The reason is because of the awful barrel distortion on the RX100, so that it can achieve its level of compactness.

I want to be able to take RAW pictures, use the RAW lab for white balance, highlight recovery,etc, while dealing with the barrel distortion in an easy manner.

While I am pleased that PSPx5 supports the .ARW format, and that I don't have to convert to DNG, I don't know what to do about the barrel distortion.
It is possible I suppose to perform a barrel distortion correction individually on every single photo I take, but this seems overly labor intensive.
A script to automagically do this on all images is probably possible...HOWEVER, the distortion depends on the amount of zoom applied, from around 3.9% wide-angle to about 0.5% at the long end. So a batchfile process isn't really appropriate.

Sony has an Image Data Converter. But, when I tried to use it, it did not save any of the barrel distortion corrections back to RAW! Otherwise I could use it as a batch converter, then use PSPx5 like normal.


Does anyone have any advise?

[photodrawken]

No image processing application by default will save corrections back to RAW because, by definition, RAW is unprocessed image sensor data.

PSPX6 does have a barrel distortion correction function. Whichever image processing app you use, you'll need to save the corrected image to another format. If you first convert the RAW to DNG, I believe the corrected DNG can be overwritten with another DNG image.

You're right that because the barrel distortion is dependent on the amount of zoom, a simple batch process wouldn't be appropriate. It might be possible to do with scripting, but I'll leave that approach to others with more knowledge of scripting to address.