Focus magic topaz labs free alternative how to#

I also use a duped layer in luminosity blend mode, and use the blend-if sliders to bias the effect towards mid-tones (and thus eliminate ringing). The way I use Focus Magic (which I believe I may have picked up from one of your previous postings) for my D3x shots is to run it with a radius of 1 and the amount in the 100-150% range depending on the lens used. IMHO capture sharpening shouldn't accentuate edges (there's a place for that in output sharpening) to me capture sharpening is about bringing back the fine details that were blurred during capture (from AA filter, etc). I find ringing artifacts particularly objectionable, and am highly sensitive to images that have that 'crunchy' look that comes from over-sharpening digital images.

On-screen though, the best results I've gotten from InFocus seem to look slightly more 'digital' than I get from FM. The best I've done is to get really really close - admittedly, close enough that the results would probably be indistinguishable in print.

So far though, I've yet to beat the results I can easily get for capture sharpening with Focus Magic. InFocus seems more prone to ringing and aliasing artifacts, but I too am finding that some work with the controls can improve results significantly. This seems less artifact prone, but does require more memory and it's slower because more data will be processed. to 200%), then do the InFocus Sharpening, and then resize back to the original size (Bicubic). Another possibility is to first resize the image (Bicubic Smoother, e.g. One has to exercise restraint, and it's always beneficial to use a sharpening layer because that gives a lot of additional control. So overall, good results can be achieved, but it is also (too) easy to generate artifacts as a by-product.

The 'Unknown/Estimate' type of blur is very interesting, because it's intended for difficult/mixed blur scenarios. The 'Straight Motion' blur type is obviously for motion blur, and again artifacts are easy to generate, perhaps too easy. Again, artifacts usually mean that too large a radius is chosen. The 'Out-of-Focus' blur type, which probably uses more of a disc shaped PSF, is intended for exactly that, OOF images, but the already in-focus areas can develop artifacts, so it's probably best used on a masked layer. InFocus does have a larger tendency to develop such artifacts than FocusMagic, but FM probably does it without user intervention and InFocus allows the user to decide. Modest 'Suppress Artifacts' settings (<25) seem enough to remove small ringing artifacts. What is too large? Well that's the trick to find out, but for a well focused shot with a good lens values around 0.80 or 1.00 seem to be good choices. For general use, I assume it's based on a Gaussian type of PSF, the 'Generic' blur type setting works best, but one has to avoid a too large radius setting. There are more options with InFocus to choose from. defocus or diffraction, which require different approaches). However, besides the seemingly dead end for 64-bit, there is not much (user) choice about which type of issue is being addressed (e.g. The options with FocusMagic are more limited and less fine grained, so it is faster to reach an optimum. My initial impression is that it takes more effort to achieve good results than with FocusMagic, but good results are possible.

Focus magic topaz labs free alternative how to#

I'm busy finding out how to get the best results with different scenarios.

It is possible to save presets, but it doesn't look like that works with the 'Estimate' mode because that requires hitting the 'Estimate Blur' button again. is missing the needed clues for a good estimate). The only InFocus feature that seems to be missing, is a possibility to export a PSF estimate and re-use it in another image (which e.g. Here is a video, that explains the 'Estimate' mode on an ideal (lots of detail) image. A custom PSF can still restore slightly more detail, but the problem then becomes how to get that more perfect custom PSF. It's 'estimate' mode, functions quite well for extracting complex PSFs from the actual image, which is a reasonable alternative for importing custom PSFs. However, especially at it's introductory price, Topaz Labs InFocus is a great tool specifically geared at real sharpening of photographic images. the Canon SDK toolkit which resulted in good demosaicing, but it changed in a more recent version. I'm not particularly impressed with its Demosaicing. Given it's price I would recommend it to those who have a keen interest in Astrophotography. ImagesPlus is much more than just a vehicle to have access to (adaptive) RL restoration (and a few other methods).