Am thinking about getting a few tilt-shift lenses to round out my lens kit. Since images with perspective distortion can be corrected by digital editing, is there really any advantage of these lenses anymore?


Regards,
Marc Christopher
www.marcchristopher.com

Your sentiment is pretty common among architectural photographer's shooting digital. However, a "transformed" image is simply not the same as a perspective correct image. The end result is vastly different.

This all goes back to the reasons behind shooting architecture with view cameras. Lens movements allow you to place the camera in an optimum position for perspective and composition, and then adjust the image framing using rise, fall or shift movements. With the Canon TS-E lenses you also have the ability to tilt the lens for plane-of-focus adjustments.

I fought this battle early on before I bit the bullet and bought the Canon TS-E lenses as well Nikon PC lenses. I found that I always compromised something when I tried to correct perspective in Photoshop. The transformed image always looked unnatural--something was just not quite right to the eye.

One more thing: when you stretch an area of an image to correct perspective you aren't creating more pixels--you're just degrading the ones you already have.

Cheers,
Alan

Your answer is what I had suspected ... am getting 2 Canon TS Lenses. Thanks

I bought the 24 and 45 TS-E lenses after doing all my corrections in Photoshop for awhile. Another advantage of these lenses is you can get it right in the camera and you don't have to spend as much time messing around with the images on the computer. Anything that helps me spend less time staring at a monitor is well worth the investment as far as I'm concerned!

Cheers,

Andrew

Great point Andrew. I'm only profitable when I'm behind the camera. File processing is not only a drudgery, it's the least profitable thing I do.

Nikon shooters are kind of stuck. I think they only make one pc lens. A 45 or so? Not really very wide.