I have a good number of night time street photography shots in which the subject is slightly out of focus.  So I was pretty excited when Topaz Labs announced InFocus, which is touted as being able to “enhance the clarity of an already well-focused image, as well as deblur an out-of-focus or motion blurred image.”  The before and after pictures on the product page are impressive, but I was not impressed with the results I was able to achieve.  In the image above, the young woman was slightly blurry before I applied InFocus, and remained slightly blurry afterwards. Below I show both the original image untouched, and with no edits except for the application of InFocus.

Before

After

I see a difference, but not an improvement. In fact, I had to carefully mark the two images so I could keep them straight, and remember which was which. I would be tempted to say that maybe the software does not work as well on faces or people, but one of their examples shows an image of a boy that shows clear improvement.  I believe I followed the instructions properly – it is fairly simple. Under the Blur section, I selected “Out-of-focus” as the Blur Type.  Then I moved the Blur radius slider to the right until I started seeing too much noise and artifacts. Then I pulled back just a bit, and adjusted the Suppress Artifacts slider.  That’s supposedly all there is to it.  But while I saw noise and artifacts increase, and perhaps a standard increase in sharpness, I did not see any reduction in out of focus blur.