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I saw an earlier question (Why prefer the 18-55mm and 55-250mm lenses vs 18-200mm?) that mentioned lower quality lenses have distortion, aberration and light fall off issues. Has software like Adobe Camera RAW come far enough along to correct these issues to an acceptable (less noticeable) level?

I use ACR often and I definitely see the distortion change when applying this adjustment. I can guess years ago before these software adjustments were around cheaper lenses suffered much more from this. I realize you can't "correct" for image quality, bokeh, aperture and those things, my question only relates to the issues in my title.

So my question is, has software corrections to lenses come so far that these three issues are no longer as important?

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StExUr
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Those aberration that you mention can indeed be compensated for in software to an amazing extent. However, there's no free lunch. Correction for distortion will reduce sharpness a tiny bit, but it's so small that I've never read about anyone obsessing about it.

What is much harder to due is to compensate for the lack of sharpness of a lens. There are a number of tools that can do pretty well in that regard but none are perfect- correcting the sharpness of a real world image produced by a certain lens is a difficult problem.

JenSCDC
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...mentioned lower quality lenses have distortion, aberration and light fall off issues. Has software like Adobe Camera RAW come far enough along to correct these issues to an acceptable (less noticeable) level?

Software can correct some of these issues, but as the wise man said, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Looking at your list of issues one by one:

  • Distortion can be corrected very well. The loss of sharpness associated with this operation is probably not significant alone, but it adds up as you lose resolution in other steps of conversion and by other corrections. This one is probably the easiest to handle in post processing, but distortion is not necessarily a problem with exception of reproduction, architecture and other technical areas of photography.

  • Some aspects of chromatic aberrations (some of the color effects) can be successfully fixed. But chromatic aberrations are caused by inability of a lens to focus different colors in the same focal plane. The resolution, that was lost during exposure can't be recovered. Purple fringing corrections remove the color, but do not get the lost image information back. Aberrations like spherical aberration, coma or astigmatism can't be fixed in software. You can crank up sharpening, but it is never the same.

  • Light falloff can be corrected as far as brightness is concerned, but you will have to amplify dark areas of the image, which usually brings up noise. Besides, light falloff can be caused by various design deficiencies that also cause loss of resolution, which, again, can't be recovered.

MirekE
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