In this brief review I have concentrated on the two NIK tools I use the most – Viveza and Perspective Correction. The corrected image is on the right and I increased the effect to 150% to achieve this. Here’s one using a sample picture supplied by DXO: Just one click! You can adjust the settings manually to increase or reduce the correction. The image on the right shows the corrected image and the people in it now look realistic. I am just showing the extreme left of the picture: I have had to obscure the faces in this sample picture as it’s a private image and I don’t have model releases from the participants.

And, of course, they didn’t appreciate being made to look like that. They looked wide – like watching an old TV show on a 14:9 screen. I had to use an ultra-wide lens to fit everyone in and the people on the edges looked odd.

I once photographed a training school, with 50+ participants, and they wanted a group photo taken in the school location. Wide-angle lenses have to squeeze a vast scene onto a tiny sensor and, no matter how good the lens is, people don’t look right. People on the edges of images taken with a wide-angle lens look wrong. This is a serious tool for a serious problem. NIK Perspective offers the following correction options, as you can see on the control screen: DXO have a vast collection of Camera/Lens profiles and NIK can access these. NIK identified the Camera and Lens used and downloaded a custom module to fix the lens distortions. I developed the image from RAW, with no distortion or lens corrections, and opened it in NIK. NIK Perspective correction fixed it easily. I shot the image on the left with a lens that has plenty of distortions, and I tilted the camera to make the distortion even worse. Here’s a simple example of NIK Perspective Correction in action:

Deformation – wide-angle lenses often make people on the edge of photos look wrong.

Converging/Diverging verticals, caused by the camera not being level.

Lens distortions, caused by deficiencies in the lens itself.

This is a new tool in the NIK collection and corrects just about every kind of distortion in an image:

Dxo viewpoint 2 review