There are many reason high-quality lenses cost as much as they do (and in some cases that is quite a lot), and one of them is that high-end lenses use many specially-designed elements that are perfectly-positioned to counteract aberrations and distortions.
But what if you could correct for all of that in post? Automatically? With just the click of a button? You could theoretically use a crappy lens and generate high-end results. Well, that’s what researchers at the University of British Columbia are working on, and so far their results are very promising.
The technique was presented at SIGGRAPH 2013, and it may some day provide a software alternative for those who can’t afford high-end glass. For their experiments, they developed a hand-made lens using only one element and then processed the resulting test images through their software to generate sharper results.
But the basic premise is that once this software knows the point spread functions (PSFs) of your cheap lens, it can correct for blur, distortion and aberration and “recover” a high-quality image.
This bit of information was astonishing. I've had this exact problem with as they point it, a crappy lens. But now that their is a software that basically will act as your lens, but in the editing room. Well that's something else.