Review: Lens correction plug-in Kekus LensFix for Aperture 2

The latest version of Kekus LensFix CI features a beta Aperture 2.1 plug-in. It works pretty well as you can see in my animated GIF below (please click to enlarge).

You can put the plug-in in the /Library/Application Support/Aperture/Plug_Ins/ folder. It’s better to add it to your ~Library/Application Suport/Aperture/Plug_ins/ folder in your user home though because it will be backed up with Time Machine in your user home.

After (re)starting Aperture 2, the plug-in is available from the Images menu:

The plug-in also adds the ability to (manually) correct chromatic aberration (CA), something that’s been greatly missed ever since the release of Aperture 2. I tried to get rid of CA on some photos with heavy CA but LensFix CI didn’t do a good job here. The photos got blurry while the purple fringes were still clearly visible. It may do a better job with photos that show just a small amount of CA.

If the camera/lens combination you used on the selected photo is in the database the pincushion and barrel correction will be applied automatically. You can switch between the versions with the revert and update buttons to see the differences. Click the corrections button to get access to the chromatic aberration, vignetting and perspective settings:

Even though the plug-in ships with over 500 camera/lens combinations I was missing my Tamron and Tokina lenses for my Nikon D80. You can have your own lens correction maps added though. The process is described on the calibration page on the PTLens website.

The plug-in hung itself up once but that’s okay since it’s still beta.

The trial version will stamp a copyright all over your corrected images but the price tag of the software is only US$30 and well worth its price.

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