Correcting digital image distortion

Firstly - apologies if this is the wrong forum, couldn't make up my mind! I'm just back from a short break in Paris, wandering about the Louvre and the Musée D'Orsay (yeah, I know, life's tough!), taking quite a few photos with my new compact digital camera. While most of the photos are fine, a few I've taken suffer from barrel distortion and, particularly for some of the monumental canvasses, some perspective distortion too.

After googling for software to fix this, I thought I'd fire up Xara and see if it could help - and, yes, there is a barrel distortion plugin that seems to do the trick, albeit more by eye than a helpful guideline. But I'm still stumped as how to fix the perspective issues. What I guess I'm wanting to do is to stretch/shrink a bitmap inside a mould, but can't seem to be able to get Xara to do that - I just seem to end up cropping to the mould shape.

Any advice or experience doing this, inside or outside of Xara, would be appreciated...

Tough life indeed. I didn't think cameras were allowed in the Louvre, etc.

The Live Effects Tool has a Barrel/Pincushion filter which you can play with to correct the distortion. (New > Deformation > Barrel Pincushion Correction. If you use this, Lock the effect before cropping.

You can also apply a default envelope with the Mould Tool. Stretch the sides. Then when the image is pretty OK, crop it back into a rectangle. If you do this, however, you need to make a Bitmap Copy first and then crop the image. Otherwise the correction is lost.

Here's what Gary's suggesting.

Excellent video Egg....thank you.

I remember doing a tutorial for Xara for this exact problem and I thought it used a slightly different solution. Problem is I can never find these tutorials when I want them. It used a southwestern style building as the example.

How does everyone else search for or keep information at hand?

Thanks, spot on!

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

Tough life indeed. I didn't think cameras were allowed in the Louvre, etc.

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Yes, but without flash. Don't know if they could take the hit on revenue not allowing all those Japanese tourists in ;-) Although I've a cheek to talk given the amount of clicking that I did too!

Nancy, I can't even remember my own name half the time, let alone when, where and what tutorial :D

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Originally Posted by Burpee

How does everyone else search for or keep information at hand?

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I use this :cool:

Very handy Steve! It is now bookmarked on my Chrome bookmarks bar:D

Edit: I just figured out that bookmarks can be copied from Chrome's bookmark manager and pasted into any folder. So now I have this bookmark in my Xara Utilites toolbar!

Me too Egg...I'm so forgetful :(

Steve, THANKYOU!!! I bookmarked it too and look what I found:

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=23798

I thought I remembered it as a tutorial but it was just a thread....she used clipview.