Bart,

I don't know about that plugin, you can do it within Photoshop with already standard filters.

Well, you are right about not knowing about that plugin, or you wouldn't make the claim that you can "do it" within Photoshop with already standard filters.

It is commonly believed that if an image is taken out-of-focus by the camera that you can't re-focus it in software, but Focus Magic uses a computationally intensive deconvolution algorithm to, within limits, do that very thing and reverse the process (each point of light becomes a halo) by which an image is defocused.

Because of camera and subject motion and imperfect function of my camera's and camcorder's auto focus features, almost all of my images are at least slightly out of focus, so I routinely sharpen their focus in Focus Magic.

Focus Magic is completely different from using Photoshop's Unsharp Mask, because Focus Magic works on the whole image and not just on edges. If for some reason I intend to use Photoshop's Unsharp Mask, I defer that processing until after I have used Neat Image to remove noise and Focus Magic to sharpen the focus.

See this comparison of Focus Magic and Unsharp Mask <http://www.focusmagic.com/exampleunsharpmask.htm> to see the difference. The difference becomes particularly obvious if you scroll down to Example 3 and compare the highlights in the eyes. Unsharp Mask merely sharpens the out-of-focus halo, while Focus Magic focuses it back down to the circular highlight it should be.

In my opinion, Adobe would be wise to include Focus Magic in their next release of Photoshop. On the other hand, I don't care if they don't, because Focus Magic comes out with improved versions much more frequently than Photoshop does.

This thread has dealt primarily with problems that people have been having with the newly released Version 3 of Focus Magic, which was provided free to all current owners of Focus Magic, without giving credit to the very significant performance improvements included in this version, including corrections for motion blur.

-- Burton -- (not associated with any vendor mentioned)

Eric_Schwerzel

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