Testing Focus Magic
Just back from my trip through Iran and Central Asia, I'm finding myself with a load of pictures - many of which were taken from a moving bus (there was little occasion to stop on some very long travel days). The result: some of those pictures would have been quite nice, were it not for some movement blur.
A great occasion to test Focus Magic which can - both as a stand-alone application and as a Photoshop-compatible plugin - deblur and tackle movement blur by using a deconvolution algorithm. Of course, if the blur is very bad, the image information just isn't there to work with, but if it isn't too bad, it should be able to improve an image.
I picked a "test" image (one I really, really wanted to improve), and set to work. Besides Focus magic, I tested two other programs as well: Picture Cooler (primarily a sharpening application, the deblurring is still experimental) and Meesoft Image Analyzer; the latter seemed more capable at deblurring, but for my purpose, both programs had a big disadvantage: they function as stand-alone programs only, while I needed to be able to work on a selection. Of course this doesn't say anything about the overall quality of these two programs - just that they're not very suitable for deblurring if you need to operate on an image selection.
On close inspection, I found there were various areas with different amounts of movement blur, and even different directions in my image. Consider a moving bus, and a stationary object along the road: I panned to get the object as best as possible in the middle of the image. You then have the movement of the bus with respect to different parts of the landscape (different distance result in different amounts of movement blur, and perspective adds to that); the road is uneven, so you get a bit of up-and-down movement as well; and finally there's the panning camera, itself moving relative to the landscape and the objects inside it. All the different directions and amounts of blur made it necessary to work with selections.
So, I loaded my "test" image in Paint Shop Pro (PSP), and worked with Focus Magic on a series of selections that had more-or-less similar movement blur. The effect on the main object (with my panning the "most stationary" bit) was stunning. In addition, I used PSP itself to actually add a little blur to the far background and the near foreground. Then I did a little bit of color enhancement to bring out the colors of the object (it was all in the shadow), and finally I used some Helicon Filter retouching to get rid of some artifacts, by some selective blurring and a touch of selective sharpening.
The first two images show the pull picture: the original and the end result, both reduced in size to 640x480: just to give an impression. These are followed by three 100% crops of the same region: the original, the image edited with Focus Magic applied to some selections and some blurring to others, and finally the end result with some color enhancement and artifact removal.
Needless to say, I'm very happy with the results of Focus Magic, and will register it today!
(Oh, BTW - the image was taken along the Tajik - Afghan border (from the Tajik side) where there are a few areas that still have landmines; you're quite safe as long as you stay on the road, though!)
