Focus Magic - 3.0.1a

You always ask yourself if something like this product is a gimic or not. Especially at $45 bucks a pop. I thought I'd try it. So I put it to the test. A blurred image, we all have 'em. An image not to bad and a good image which I would have sharpened anyhow. I always apply a little sharpening to most images. Well, to put it simply this Focus Magic works. All tests were done using two of the same images side by side. One using FM and the other using the standard unsharp mask found in PS. On the blurred image using the maximum setting in unsharp mask I was able to get a respectable looking image BUT with halo effects throughout, very unexceptable. Using FM equal results BUT without the halo effects and I used a low setting in the FM product. I could have used a much higher setting, and I did, just to see what happened, but I got the halo setting and the sharpness did not improve that much. Clearly it worked. On the not so blurred image, again using the two comparisons, FM and unsharp mask, no halo effect with FM and an obvious halo effect using unsharp mask. On a normal image, the sharping effect using FM left absolutely no halo effect even when enlarged to 1600x and w/unsharp mask I got an equally sharp image but when blown up to 1600x I could see edge haloing beginning to appear. I will buy this product and use it to sharpen even my good images. One last note. It comes with a built-in noise reducer which you can control and my last observation was, when blown up after applying sharpening, using both images I noticed that the gradations in skin tone were much, much better with FM than when using unsharp mask. With unsharp mask areas of the cheek showed solid white pixels and with FM none of this occured. I imagine this product would be excellent to use if you are producing images for the web. Very user friendly and intuitive. The automatic settings were right on. Remember this though, it is an algorithm, and requires a fast processor. I have a 2.66 ghz Mac and when used on a high setting it took several minutes to process my sharpened image. A slow processor, well, you might as well go have lunch.

This plugin undersells itself.

You would be forgiven for thinking this is yet another sharpening plugin, aimed at simplifying the complex world of unsharp masking for optimal effect. If this is what you are after, you should look at Photokit Sharpener or The Light's Right Professional Sharpener.

But it isn't that at all. This is a true deconvolution refocuser. In other words, it actually refocuses blur, rather than creating a halo which the eye interprets as sharpness. This means that you can (and should) refocus the image as soon as you have loaded it.

Although it's useful for recovering detail from hopelessly blurred images, Focus Magic doesn't really make them beautiful. However, on images which are almost sharp — a common result of using autofocus — a setting of 1 or 2 will make them absolutely sharp, massively refining the image and seemingly washing the sleep out of the eyes of models.

I really would not have believed this until I saw it. In my book this is the most useful and important Photoshop Plugin released to date.