Focus Magic

Thanks for the product blurb. I will make a note of that... looks like it could help with pictures slightly soft due to subject or photographer movement.

Assuming that the first image is the original, it looks to me like one of the main things that this filter does is to apply usm sharpening with a high radius value. This has caused the highlight area to loose detail. I think you could obtain better results using a little work in Levels/Curves in PS/ or PS Elements and more judicious use of usm. Please excuse me if this seems over critical.

Absolutely not overcritical. I was fooling around with this, and thought others might want to download the trial and form their own opinion.

I just downloaded this Dan and so far I like what I see. I've tried downloads of Nik Sharpener Pro and FocalBlade and really wasn't impressed as I didn't see anything that they had that I couldn't do with USM. With Focus Magic I took a blurred photo and cropped off over 50% and then tried the sharpening and despeckle and it came out very well, using their auto values. The limiting factor to this software though is that they only give you 5 images to work on before you have to register. I would have to experiment a lot more than that . About the only program that I've kept from numerous trial downloads has been NeatImage which I've been using for years and is really super.

It's sharper but it blew out the highlights pretty badly. You could do MUCH better than this given the original.

E.J. Peiker wrote:It's sharper but it blew out the highlights pretty badly. .

I didn't seem to jave that problem. Here's an original OOF and the one redone with the software and significant crop and noise removed.

Harvey, do you recall what your settings were? BTW, warning, they count 5 tries on the same image as 1 try on 5 images. They should really go to a watermark or timebomb, or unlimited tries on 5 unique images. It really did better for you than on mine. Now that I have a realy copy, I'll see if I can do as well as you did.

dbarthel wrote:Harvey, do you recall what your settings were? BTW, warning, they count 5 tries on the same image as 1 try on 5 images. They should really go to a watermark or timebomb, or unlimited tries on 5 unique images. It really did better for you than on mine. Now that I have a realy copy, I'll see if I can do as well as you did.

I used the auto setting and used the eye of the bird as the focal point. It's possible that perhaps you tried to sharpen the image too aggressively. Now BTW...I do all my adjustments before I sharpen. Their despeckling filter also did a nice job as I tried it on another image which I purposely made a bit noisier.

Another effort with less sharpening. Better I think, but didn't do as well as Harvey's recovery.