LensFun

Udi released UFRaw 0.13 just a couple of days ago. Among other nice improvements it features 8/16bit PNG export + Exif and GUI for ratio constrained cropping. Next version might be out with some great new stuff that is exactly the reason for this blog post.

If you ever took pictures you might know that even with great lenses you cannot avoid various issues like geometric distortions, vignetting and chromatic aberrations. While you can resolve this kind of issues manually, some kind of automation would be nice, eh?

This is where lens databases shine: they store various data on lens characteristics that helps automatically applying corrections. An application using such a database would look at Exif metadata to find out, which lens was used, and load correspondent database data to process the picture. Probably most well-known application on the scene is the proprietary DxO Optics Pro. In the open source world we used to have PTLens, but it turned away from FOSS world at some stage (some apps like Yogi still rely on it).

So, naturally, during Pablo‘s talk on LGM this May we discussed need for new free-as-in-speech lens database. Later Yuval Levy provided a draft of mysql database structure and then Andrew Zabolotny picked this up and turned it to a real project called now LensFun.

While the project goes fast forward, some help would be appreciated. The last free version of the PTlens database that was inherited contains some data required for automatic processing of images, but recent additions do not contain such data. We actually need a tool to create measurements from images to fill the database. The question is whether someone with good math background could step in and help

Since UFRaw already uses great Exiv2 library to read/write metadata, mating it with LensFun would get us significantly further to a more efficient RAW workflow.