Getting new lenses for Lensfun

Published on in Germany, Life in Germany

Rosen sind rot… And yes, by another name, they do still smell sweet! The focus of this image is two red roses seen from the side, positioned in the right-hand third of the picture and in focus. The rest of the image is out of focus. The power half of the image is rows of distant green grape vines. The next quarter of the image is out-of-focus homes, mostly white with red-orange roofs. And the last quarter right at the top of the image is a mostly cloudy sky.

Since moving to Germany, I’ve started taking pictures. Lots here is beautiful, and my cell phone camera just didn’t seem to be cutting it. So I bought a camera – a (used) Canon G5 X. The photos at the top and bottom of this post are a couple I’m proud of.

Of course, using a real camera means using real photo editing software. I run Linux on my laptop. Specifically, at the moment, Ubuntu. Ubuntu comes with ShotWell. I chose to shoot raw photos, so that I would have the maximum flexibility in editing them. In turn, this means I need software that can edit raw photos. For that, I chose DarkTable (which could probably do all the photo management, but I just haven’t gotten around to trying that workflow).

I’ve only got one major pain point with DarkTable: Lens correction. When a camera takes a photo, the lens typically causes certain distortions. For digital cameras, these are easily corrected in software – if you know what the distortions caused …

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