fotoholico wrote:
With my appetite whetted by hearing about CS2’s Smart Sharpen, but not the budget to buy CS2, I’ve been looking at sharpening plug-ins, at the sub-$50 mark.
Has anyone done a comparison of plug-ins like Ultrasharpen, Focus Magic and Focal Blade?
The images I want help with are mainly when I’ve got motion blur due to too long an exposure, although sometimes lens blur when the auto-focus gets it wrong too….
I use Focus Magic and wouldn’t be without it. It seems to find edge lines and then thin them. You can certainly over do it with this tool too, but it doesn’t look the same at USM. A line will begin to get a shadow. You do have to crank it a fair bit though. It always shows in the preview.
I used Focus Magic in 7, CS, and CS2. I think it’s way better than Smart Sharpen in CS2. I use FM on every picture that I edit. The sharper it is to start with the better it is. Once a picture starts to need more than 7 pixels of correction, the quality starts to go down.
The problem is that a picture that blurry is already missing a fair bit of detail. Nothing will add that detail back in. So sharpening that much tends to give an spooky look to your detail. You get blur in the middle of an object with over done edges.
This is particularly true when you are correcting for motion blur. With just a tad of motion blur, Focus Magic does a remarkable job. Over 7 pixels of correction it almost hopeless. I have very rarely found a motion blur correction of over 7 pixels that I found acceptable. Under that, it is a very handy tool to have.
Focus blur fixing has an automatic feature that makes it pretty fast to get the right settings. Motion blur fixing doesn’t. It takes a bit more work. For one thing, it isn’t always easy to tell which way the blur is moving. If it is just camera movement, you can usually find a degree that will work well. If it is subject movement or worse multiple movements, then you are in trouble.
I usually run focus blur correction twice on each picture that I edit. The first time I do it at the needed amount and the second at half that. For example, the first pass would be at 2 pixels and the second at 1 pixel. This just adds to the crispness of the picture.
While I haven’t used the others, I highly recommend Focus Magic.
Clyde
