Some cameras offer a setting to enable or disable lens correction, but mine don’t. Since the information about lens distortion is included in the metadata in the RAW file, either the camera can correct when creating a JPEG or software can correct later, if you only shoot in RAW. My camera also made the same corrections to this photo in creating a JPEG. If you look very closely, you can also see the curves are a bit different, correcting the distortion. You can also see an overall difference in lighting this is a bit surprising, but both Apple Photos and Affinity Photo show the corrected photo like this. In correcting the distortion, the photo cuts off the corners a bit to make them straighter. The correction is most obvious if you look at the top corners. I then scaled both screenshots to the same size. The second version is from a screenshot taken when viewing the same file with Quick Look in the macOS Finder. The first screenshot below shows a file opened in Affinity Photos with the lens correction setting turned off this makes the app display the RAW file with no alteration. But have a look at an example to see how different a RAW file can look without and with lens correction. Not all of these types of distortion will be obvious with all lenses you have more pincushion distortion in a wide angle lens than a telephoto, and chromatic aberration may be very visible, or may be hard to spot, and it may depend on your subject and lighting. Here is a good explanation of these types of distortion, with a number of images showing how each one presents in photos.

Chromatic aberration is caused by the failure of the lens to focus different colors to the same spot.

Pincushion distortion causes straight lines to appear to bend inward.Barrel distortion causes straight lines to appear to bow outward.Vignetting causes the edges, especially the corners, of an image to be darker than the center.So what is lens correction? Let me quote an explanation from an Adobe document about its Camera Raw app:

This said, if you’re using a non-digital lens on a camera with an adapter, you won’t get any such information it’s possible that some third-party software may be able to apply correction for this type of lens. It’s likely that Apple supports those lenses that add metadata to the RAW files, which covers most lenses people are likely to use. I haven’t been able to find a database of which lenses Apple is aware of, but there is a document showing which cameras are supported for RAW files.

This lens correction is not only applied in the Photos app, but also within macOS if you have a RAW file and view it using Quick Look (select the file and press the space bar), lens correction is applied. It’s interesting to know that Apple’s Photos app also applies lens correction, yet doesn’t tell you anything about it. In some cases, this can even be using a huge database of information about lenses and cameras. If you shoot RAW files, many apps that process these files can also apply lens correction, using metadata stored with the files, to create better images. Because of this, cameras often use lens correction to create JPEGs from the original light information, or when converting RAW files into JPEGs. When you take a digital photo, the camera you use receives light through its lens, but the light information it gets can be slightly distorted.

Photo correction software for mac