Fine-tune performance
Apply digital lens corrections to mask imperfections
There’s no need to feel disheartened if you don’t own a full complement of high-end, super-sharp Canon l glass or sigma art lenses. These days there are plenty of digital fixes for optical problems such as chromatic aberration, distortion and vignetting, allowing you to improve the quality of the image produced by the lenses that you do have.
Canon cameras come with lens correction controls that enable the effects of aberrations to be reduced automatically. The number of options available varies: the EOS 1300D enables you to correct an image’s dark corners with its Peripheral Illumination correction; the EOS 5D Mark IV, on the other hand, has a raft of adjustments that can be switched on or off (see right). Each camera is pre-loaded with correction data for a set of lenses. You can use Canon’s EOS Utility software on a computer to see which lenses have data stored on your camera, as well as registering additional ones.
Even high-end lenses can benefit from these corrections – you’ll often see dark corners on images shot with ‘fast’ lenses that are used wide open at large apertures, for example. You won’t be able to apply the fixes to JPEGS that you’ve already taken, but corrections can be applied to Raw files that you go on to process in-camera. You can only activate or deactivate each function, so for more precise control over the results, it’s better to apply the corrections in software. Canon’s Digital Photo Professional will recognize the settings you made on the camera when the shot was taken, but if you prefer to carry out your Raw conversions in third-party software, such as Lightroom, you’ll have to start from scratch and use the automatic or manual lens corrections available there.