Is there a way to remove perspective curvature in close-ups?

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2020-05-04 07:01:34

I use Pixelmator to post-process product photos. I take the photos with an iPhone then fix alignment, colour, and cropping and remove the background in software. It is efficient and produces a good result except for one minor problem.

My product is, unfortunately, note books, which are rectangles. The phone is about 200mm from the product and the result is that the sides of the notebooks in the image curve inwards a smidge. I live with it, but it would be nice fix it. There are various solutions to this (shoot from the top of a ladder with grown-up camer with a telephoto lens aimed at the product on the floor, for example, or even better, sell "pregnant" notebooks with bulgy sides so they look flat in the photos, then blame the customer's monitor for the deception.)

The ladder scenario is unpopular because it would need (a) a ladder and (b) a new camera and lens, and the lighting becomes much trickier.

However, this is 2020 so it seems like there should be a software solution. Is there tool in Pixelmator that will re-square my notebooks?

Thanks for your help!
Russ
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2020-05-04 13:31:46

Hey Lightly Peated, unfortunately, right now, fixing this reliably using Pixelmator Pro would probably be a little tricky. I would try to add some guidelines (regular alignment guides or line shapes) then apply the Bump effect: Format > Effects > Distortion > Bump. Then using your lines as a guide try and customize the effect to get rid of the curvature.

Also, do you happen to have an example photo you might be able to share? Playing around with it might help lead to some new ideas.

Oh, and we plan to add a lens distortion correction adjustment that would fix bumps like this — in fact, one has been more or less developed but there's some groundwork that needs to be done before it can be integrated into our adjustment engine.
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2020-05-05 05:47:12

Andrius,
Thanks for your reply. The news that correction is in the pipeline is all I need to hear. I am happy to post slightly convex pictures until a finely tuned, user friendly, problem-specific solution is available. My store has a ridiculous number of product variants and hand-tweaking each photo beyond the current colour adjustment would drive me to drink hand sanitiser...

I await the official release with barely-controlled excitement!
Russ
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2020-05-05 12:29:30

Haha, glad to hear it! By the way, would you be able to share a sample image or two anyway? I'd pass it on to the devs and we could use it for testing to make sure we cover workflows like yours.