Straight lines become curved

Hi gang, I have been having a big problem with taking close up of ceramic tiles. I maintain a website for my company and when I take close up pictures of a tile that has straight lines running across it, the lines always apperar to be curved, like the picture was taken with a fish-eye lens.
I am using a standard Kodak digital camera worth about 300 dollars Canadian so I suppose it is a fairly good one. I try to upload a photo here but it doesn't work for some reason.
So here is the link.

http://www.midgleywest.com/images/my...tellofloor.jpg

Any help is apreciated.

DB

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoctorBombay

Hi gang, I have been having a big problem with taking close up of ceramic tiles. I maintain a website for my company and when I take close up pictures of a tile that has straight lines running across it, the lines always apperar to be curved, like the picture was taken with a fish-eye lens.
I am using a standard Kodak digital camera worth about 300 dollars Canadian so I suppose it is a fairly good one. I try to upload a photo here but it doesn't work for some reason.

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Standard lenses are curved field. Even though these lens can get up close as with macro, they don't have the flat field that a true macro lens has. Small lenses on consumer cameras are even worse.

What you really need is a DSLR and a true macro lens to avoid this problem. That, of course, means money!

Two other ways you can do it:

1) Make sure the camera is absolutely level all the way around. This means put it on a tripod and check it with a bubble level. You could use something like a copy stand for this too - a tripod's legs might get in the shot. This will greatly reduce any curved lines.

2) You can clean up any distortion that's left in Photoshop. I would bet that you'd cure enough of the problem with #1 above that this wouldn't really be necessary for your use.