DxO Brings a Unique ReShape Fusion Tool to ViewPoint 5

by Mel Martin October 15, 2024 1 Comment

DxO has continued to innovate with tools for serious photo editors, and today they are releasing a significant update to ViewPoint 5, their tool that fixes geometry, perspective, and shapes. Anyone who does architectural or city photography is going to want this tool if they don't have it already.

DxO ViewPoint allows photographers to overcome imperfect geometry, fix problematic perspectives, and perfect vital image details. This major update enhances the ReShape tool, adding powerful local warping of perspective, scale, and horizons, while introducing more ways to use DxO ViewPoint’s exclusive volume deformation corrections to combat the stretching caused by wide angle lenses.

“If you need to adjust perspective or geometry—whether that’s across the whole image or specific areas—there’s nothing else on the market like DxO ViewPoint 5,” explains Product Manager Fabrizio Dei Tos. “For version 5, the increased level of control gives you beautifully simple solutions to otherwise complex and fiddly problems.”

Introduced in version 4, the ReShape tool allowed photographers to realign and reposition small but vital details in their photos. In version 5, this is upgraded to ReShape Fusion, giving users powerful ways to balance and harmonize images. Previously, users were limited to manually dragging points in the tool’s mesh, but DxO ViewPoint 5 introduces Move, Rotate, and Scale options to perform far more complex edits. Alongside this is the innovative Propagation slider, which steadily migrates those effects to surrounding points, allowing for more natural and photographic changes than ever before. Furthermore, the new Sticky Borders checkbox maintains the original crop of the image.

You can see the tool at work here, starting with this image:

And then reshaping the balloons to have a more dramatic effect:

You can get a better idea seeing the tool at work in this video from DXO:

In this wedding photo, perspective tools were used to make the building sides parallel and still save the foreground perspective:

The finished image really doesn't show any signs of editing, which is of course what the photographer wanted.

Local Horizon and Perspective Editing

The new ReShape Fusion tool adds more functionality, with new modes for Horizon and Perspective control. These take DxO ViewPoint’s regular Horizon and Perspective tools and combine them with the power of local adjustments. Photographers simply target the specific part of the image that needs to be realigned, make the adjustment, and then refine the changes with the Propagation slider to blend the effect with the rest of the photo.

Trying ViewPoint 5 With My Photos

I don't do a lot of photos with buildings that need to be fixed. Primarily, I'm a landscape and night sky photographer, but I had some troublesome photos and put ViewPoint 5 to the test.

This was shot in Bisbee, Arizona, with my smartphone at a wide angle.

It's pretty much a mess but I put it into Viewpoint 5 and got this with one click:

The image looked much, much better. I could continue to use the included ViewPoint tools to make the buildings exactly parallel, but this is a great one-click start. Usually, ViewPoint 5 wants some metadata from the camera and lens to do a perfect job, but this copy of a copy of an image had nothing. Still, ViewPoint 5 did a great job.

There are perspective tools in Photoshop, Lightroom, Luminar Neo, and other editors, but not to this extent or with such precise control. Like the rest of the DxO products, such as PureRAW, I would not want to be in an editing session without these solutions. These are powerful and easy-to-use tools. Highly recommended.