I need to take some pictures and undistort them in a specific way (i.e. not just correcting for lens distortion). At work I use DXO Viewpoint for this (well, I did until IT berkeleyed everything up and now it wont work)
Basically I take a photo of something 2d on a flat surface with a 1x1" grid behind it. Then in DXO I can undistort the image by grabbing points on that grid and telling it "this is actually a rectangle" and it will fix it. Then I scale using the grid for reference and boom, accurate 2d image I can trace in CAD. It works great for reverse engineering 2d shapes and for getting a 99% accurate hole pattern.
I've tried searching for alternatives as I think there must be free software with this capability, but I can't figure out exactly how to search for it.
What devices do you have at your disposal? The image editor on my Samsung phone can do all sorts of distortions and warps.
Here's an example of what I often do (although my stuff is much closer to square )
https://youtu.be/ApqLQKWYR2Y?si=UN8FuZoWXT4Vk_Db&t=70
I'll check when I'm at my computer, but I'm 95% certain GIMP has a transform tool that can do that.
In reply to WonkoTheSane :
I figured. Paint.net has a few options capable of it, however they don't allow you to pick points on the actual image, just drag the corners around. With a different interface they would work perfectly, but they are useless to me now.
WonkoTheSane said:
I'll check when I'm at my computer, but I'm 95% certain GIMP has a transform tool that can do that.
https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-filter-lens-distortion.html
It's not automatic but the filter is there.
I haven't used it but there's also a plugin to make it automatic-ish if you know the camera lens specs or can get it from the exif data.
http://seebk.github.io/GIMP-Lensfun/
Yeah thats similar to the paint.net options. It doesn't let you pick 4 points on the image and tell it "this is a rectangle" and have it adjust.
I'm not trying to correct from camera lens only - I need to correct for perspective as well.
I know of software from the 90s that could do it. I think it was called rmorph.
Good luck finding it now. Probably the wrong name, it was (letter)morph and it ran just fine on my 286 running MSDOS 3.3.
30 second edit: Found it!
kb58
UltraDork
7/14/24 7:05 p.m.
This reminds me of a documentary where the cops had tracked down a bad guy to a website where he had a highly distorted image of himself, so it was unrecognizable. A cop said, "that looks like a standard 'swirl' tool was used to make that, let me try something." He put the image into a graphics app, selected "swirl", but swirled it the opposite direction. Presto... and "doh!"
Longshot and not sure this is exactly what you need...
Have you tried the "scanner" inside the notes app in iPhone?
OHSCrifle said:
Longshot and not sure this is exactly what you need...
Have you tried the "scanner" inside the notes app in iPhone?
I'll take a look. MS Teams scan app does something similar, but its not precise. You'd have a hell of a time aligning the point where 2 printed black lines converge on a sheet of paper.
In reply to prodarwin :
It's great for taking a perspective photo and squaring it by dragging the 4 corners of a polygon. ie a "scan" like a document or a check
