Adobe Subscription Sharpening Tool

[Martin Boekers]

A while back when we were discussing the plusses and minuses of Adobe's subscription service, I recall some mention of a tool are action that would sharpen out of focus images. If someone that has subscribed could post their review on this and some samples that would be great! Thanks! Also if they have improved their "Increasing the resolution on a low res bitmap" that would be nice too.

[Scott Shepherd]

Marty, email or me post a photo here that's blurry and I'll apply the filter to it. I've used it a couple times. It worked okay for what I had, but I had a very old, black and white photo from the 20's or 30's, that had a lot of issues, so I'm not sure I saw the best results.

You can also isolate certain areas to have different amounts of "fixing" to it.

[Martin Boekers]

Just sent one Scott, Thanks!

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks, that's a doozy Give me a little time to try and get that one sorted out. Suggest less caffeine for the photographer in the future

[Martin Boekers]

Welcome to my world.... don't spend too much time on it, just a quick go over. Thanks!

[Ruben Salcedo]

Martin,

the sharpen tool is call "Shake Reduction" and like Scott said, it gives different results with different images, all around I do like it... where you have mix results is with grainy images, the new oversampled function in Photoshop is prety decent, it does a good job in increasing resolution, and on this one also you'll get different results according with the image that you start with, just like in any other tool for increasing resolution.

Ruben

[Lee DeRaud]

...the new oversampled function in Photoshop is prety decent, it does a good job in increasing resolution, and on this one also you'll get different results according with the image that you start with, just like in any other tool for increasing resolution.

The thing I always liked about PhotoZoomPro2 (which I think comes bundled in Corel now), is that it has pretty much every oversample/interpolate algorithm known to man built into it: at least one of them works for almost every image, just have to work through the options.

[Ruben Salcedo]

I've never used photozoom, I have been a user of Perfect Resize 7.5 formely known as Genuine Fractals for many years, Perfect Resize is better than Photoshop only becouse there are options-adjustments to make it better, in photoshop is automatic but it is very acceptable.

[George Carlson]

The Unsharp Mask is the tool used by professionals. It mimics a technique used in the darkroom for sharpening a silver image. What it really does is increase the contrast along edges, thus making the image snappier. Here's how I use the tool: Set the Amount to about 200. Set the Threshold to around 3. Adjust the Radius until a white line starts to appear around objects, then back-off a bit. It's a good idea to adjust the levels first (another subject).

[Scott Shepherd]

First, let me say I know this image has some issues, once corrected. Probably for 2 reasons, 1, I don't know how to use the options, 2, it might not be able to solve all the issues. I do, however, think that a quick clone brush touch up on some double image areas would get this ready to use fairly quickly.

I spent about 4 minutes on this, so that should show the amount of time to get to this point. I imagine with a little testing and some more fine tuning, it might clean up a lot more.

Image on left, original, image on right, after filter. Note that it messed up 1 lady's necklace, but fixed the other one!
Screen Shot 2013-08-09 at 7.04.32 PM.jpg

[Scott Shepherd]

With about 10 minutes of playing with it, there are some improvements, none done with the camera shake. If I knew how to use Photoshop, I could do better. The purple blouse where the artifacts from the gold chain were are a mess. I used content aware replace to get rid of it and it made a mess. Not good enough with PS to fix that, but was able to sharpen areas like the top right shoulder details of the gold things on her sweater on the right.
Screen Shot 2013-08-09 at 7.27.19 PM.jpg

[Martin Boekers]

WoW Scott! I have to say I am impressed! Could you email the final to my Hot Mail acct?
Thanks!

It looks like I'll play with the subscription on my home computer for a couple months. My copy of CS1
is not compatible on the IMac I just bought, until I can get a version that works.

[Jeff Belany]

I think the filter did a fair job. Some work on the glare on the ladies glasses would help a lot.

Jeff in northern Wisconsin

[Martin Boekers]

I think the filter did a fair job. Some work on the glare on the ladies glasses would help a lot.

Jeff in northern Wisconsin

This was an extreme example, yes with a bit more retouching it could be improved. The main thing to me is a basically unsellable
image became sellable. Sometimes we don't have options to retake a shot or use a different frame of a series. This is esp true with critical
images with rapid movements, such as sports or low light situations.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

There is a free program out there called SmartDeblur that helps resolve motion, focus & other issues in photos. I have downloaded it and experimented with last Fall and it did a nice job.

Lee mentioned PhotoZoomPro. It's a great program. I have been using it for years. With the newer releases of PaintShopPro, I have not needed PhotoZoomPro nearly as often. It does not do the same things as SmartDeblur.