Straighten Your Photos by Warping Them
Review by Erik Vlietinck
DxO ViewPoint 4 has received more than just a polishing round with version 4. The new version adds important new features and a more efficient interface. It integrates seamlessly with PhotoLab, and as a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Lightroom Classic. Its standalone app was the one I tested.
One new feature turns this upgrade into a must-have, but first the lesser goods. There’s a new mirroring tool that lets you flip images around their horizontal or vertical axis, and there are guides. A navigation sidebar also allows you to go quickly to an image that you were working on before.
The feature that really makes this an upgrade instead of an update, however, is the new Reshape tool. For instance, you can realign crooked architecture with the ReShape tool, which has a customizable grid and extensive control points that allow for precise manipulation. Complex distortions can be corrected, because you can adjust the grid from only a few control points to a great many and, while the press demo used a photo of a lighthouse that was oddly distorted, I instantly thought of a totally different scenario.
I’ve been scanning specific pages of books into my notes app. I use my iPad from the Import menu on my iMac, and then use TextSniper to scan the pages into my Bear notes app. Most of these books are hard copies, but TextSniper has difficulty extracting paragraphs in the “wave” caused when the open book doesn’t lie perfectly flat (and I’d hate to break the book’s spine).
That problem has now been solved with the Reshape tool in ViewPoint 4. I can scan a page, open it in ViewPoint 4, and flatten the entire page perfectly in less time than it costs me to recompose the paragraphs after TextSniper has extracted them. Photographers who shoot rare books will love this new tool.
