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.
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Brandt Steinhauser
29 Nov 2010Mark,
I tried InFocus on one image so far. Like you, I wasn’t impressed. It sharpened it a little bit, but man I had to really look for it. Hopefully I will have some time to try it on some more images.
-Brandt