Adding lens corrections to Affinity Photo

[Jamon]

My camera is listed under "Supported Raw Cameras", but there is no automatic lens correction. It is not in the Lensfun library, but their website says, "Note that new camera models can be added very easily. Contact the Lensfun maintainers for this."

 

Are we supposed to contact Lensfun, then wait for Affinity updates, to get better coverage for newer cameras? Or do you plan to acquire more extensive lens distortion models a different way? I can use the Lensfun software to produce the corrections, but I'm wondering how viable this approach is, where their database is missing popular cameras, and most customers are probably unwilling to do the extra work to get their camera supported.

 

For now I thought I'd open an image from an older supported model of the camera, then make a preset from the automatic lens correction settings. But the "Lens Correction" panel is checked, with everything at 0% defaults. Unchecking it does not disable the "Develop Assistant" lens correction, and it does not display which settings were used, so one cannot discover them to adjust or apply to other unsupported camera files.

[Lee D]

Hi Jamon,

Welcome to the forums.

 

The Supported RAW list is separate to the Lensfun library we include, to have a particular camera/lens added you would need to contact Lensfun so they can add it. They do have instructions you can run through to provide them with all the information needed from your camera and lens to speed the process up. When we update Affinity Photo the most recent Lensfun library will be included.

 

To turn off lens correction being automatically applied when opening a RAW file, you need to change the setting to Take no action in the Develop Assistant. The Lens panel will still be available and you can adjust the sliders and create a preset, any presets can only be selected from the Lens panel after an RAW file has been opened.

[Jamon]

I emailed the Lensfun maintainer approaching a week ago, and there's no response yet. I have doubts about relying upon Lensfun in this manner. At the very least, I think there should be a function to update the Lensfun library from within the current version of Affinity, so one must not wait for an Affinity update; and also the ability to add your own Lensfun lens profile data to your local library, for people who cannot wait for the Lensfun maintainer to include it.

 

Who pays the Lensfun maintainer? What happens when they get ill? Does Affinity pay people to profile lenses, and contribute the data, to keep the library complete? Because my camera is extremely popular, released almost half a year ago, and there's no support in Lensfun yet. New cameras are released all the time, and this will be an ongoing problem, where people will be waiting for an open source project to support their commercial software.

 

If Serif is going to depend on Lensfun, I hope they are contributing to the project, either in the form of money or data, and making an effort to keep it up to date. There should also be multiple maintainers, where a Serif employee has commit access to the official repo; or forks the library, to control and work on it independently, while sharing patches upstream, so if the original project slows down or closes, Affinity is unaffected.