Why is my new lens not supported by my camera’s lens correction feature?
Lauren Jennings, Birmingham
Brian Says… Many recent cameras include the lens aberration correction feature. With this active, images are processed by the DIGIC processor to reduce vignetting, chromatic aberration and distortion. If you shoot in Raw, photos don’t have the correction applied unless you use Canon DPP to process the files. Lightroom, Photoshop and other Raw-processing software have their own tools for removing aberrations.
Some older lenses, particularly from film EOS era, did have quite noticeable vignetting, but as you rarely saw the edges of your negatives in print it went largely unnoticed. With digital cameras, particularly full-frame, this darkening of the edge is much more apparent. Also, older wideangle lenses often exhibit some chromatic aberration – purple fringing – at the edge of the frame. Chromatic aberration was also less visible in small-size prints.
Cameras that support lens correction can store up to 40 different lenses, though only 30 are pre-installed at the factory. These are mostly more recent lenses, and only Canon lenses can be corrected in-camera. If your lens is much more recent than your camera, or much older, it might not be installed.
I have an old EF 14mm f/2.8l USM lens from 1991 that shows quite noticeable darkening at the corners of the frame. Adding the lens to the camera is simple, you need to connect the camera to your computer and use the current version of EOS Utility to update the camera’s lens list. Start EOS Utility, select Camera Settings and Register Lens Aberration Correction Data. If a lens is fitted to the camera that is not already installed it will be added automatically. Later editions of EOS Utility support more lenses, so it’s worth keeping up to date.