The application seems to do what it claims, and runs fine on Macbook Pro with latest OS. It is fairly intuitive, though it did take me a little while to get used to inputting the real points and figuring out what was the purpose of that. Overall it was a pretty good value.
I had problems figuring out how this works and sent a message to the developer. I never expected a response and thought I had thrown away my money. Much to my surprise, I received a prompt email reply. They followed up with me until I got the results that I wanted on my project! I highly recommend this app and appreciate all of the customer service that it offered.
Nice for careful alignment of document scans if you have good reference points
I have scans of a number of charts that I need to align very closely. The scans aren't perfectly straight, and aren't even perfectly rectangular. Plumb-Bob is doing a very good job of helping me align them. There are some UI quirks (it wasn't at all clear to me initially that there were separate Work and Result views, so I initially had trouble figuring out how to correct an adjustment without closing the document and starting over). And I had to do a bit of experimentation (the Y axis adjustment values didn't go with the pins that I expected). But once I got that figured out, it started progressing pretty quickly, and I've been quite happy with the results. In addition to the UI changes, I do wish the pins didn't reset every time I opened a new document: since I'm processing a series of related charts, the pins would be close to the correct position and I would just have to tweak them. It would also be great if the app had some kind of "auto-position" feature — in my case, the charts all have a nice border around them that provides nice, predictable positions for placing the pins (but I realize that kind of detection is rather challenging). Also, I'm not able to do my cropping inside this app because there doesn't seem to be any way to scroll in the result view, so I can't adjust the crop rectangle while zoomed in enough to be precise. Overall I'm quite happy, and I hope the app continues to improve. (I have not tried the lens correction, image adjustment, or scale features as I don't need them for this work.)
• What Plumb-Bob can do? With Plumb-Bob you are able to transform an usual picture in a plan view. It is sufficent to know 4 key points of the plan to rectify. Plumb-Bob is a perspective rectifier useful in many fields: architectural survey, building renovation, furnishing design, estate agents, and it represents a real completion for the metric / photographic survey. • How it works? There are few ingredients needed: A picture not too big (2 MegaPixels are enough), where 4 known key points are clearly visible. The real coordinates of the 4 key points. These points have to lay on the same plan we want to survey and they have not to be on the same line (not collinear). The more distant the points are and the less will be the margin of error. • Lens distortion correction tool Plumb-Bob provides also a tool for correcting lens distortion (an aberration that causes straight lines to curve). The algorithm can use correction parameters, for a large number of lenses, from the Lensfun database (http://lensfun.sourceforge.net), which is included in the software. • Results As result you get a rectified image you can use as template in your CAD application, in order to retrace the drawing. • More… Once you have made the rectification, Plumb-Bob knows the parameters needed to know to convert every point on the image in real world coordinates. You can get real distances directly on the picture.
