Does anyone have any knowledge of or experience with a sharpening program by Franzis - Sharpen Projects Professional? It is, purportedly, based on deconvolution, rather than the usual darken/lighten edges.
Hi Marv,
I had it on my list to evaluate, so I just spent a bit of time on testing it. The first impression is that it does quite a good job (within the range of possibilities) of correcting motion/vibration blur, and the deconvolution quality does not produce too many artifacts, if any. It also offers more control over the process than e.g. Piccure+.
The Photoshop Plugin is an Export Automation plugin, which is less convenient than a plugin filter that can be applied to a layer. I find that to be a drawback for my workflow, although I understand the technical (multiscale) reasons behind it. So the plugin is more often going to be used as the final step before producing output.
An alternative workflow is to start editing the unsharpened TIFF output of a Raw converter in Sharpen Projects Professional, and then finish by sending the result to Photoshop for final work. The complication of that is that if resizing is part of the Photoshop editing, a re-sharpening will be required by exporting to "Sharpen PP".
"Sharpen PP" is also useful for output sharpening with deconvolution. It will automatically find the proper PSF to resharpen the output after resizing.One can then add some structure to enhance that result and compensate for media losses like those caused by ink diffusion.
As I currently use Focus Magic and am always interested in any (true) deconvolution product, I am wondering if it is worth a trial download or if someone who has already run it through its paces can say it's not worth it.
I'm also a FocusMagic user, and will probably continue to use it for the foreseeable future, but FocusMagic is limited to dealing with (the most common kind of) more predictable kinds of blur. Sharpen Projects does deal better with more complex blur.
It uses the deconvolution for deblurring, and then offers a few additional simple controls to adjust structure and crispness of the image, which is the correct approach (instead of trying to do everything with deconvolution). I would have preferred to have a better control over clipping that can result from deconvolving blur, because the deconvolution will increase the contrast when it transforms dull low contrast micro-detail into sharper and thus higher contrast detail, even before boosting structure. P.S. It can be adjusted if the e.g. TIFF input is treated as RAW and that is adjustable.
If used only for the deconvolution (which is good), it's a bit pricey, but if it's used instead of some other tools it is more reasonably priced (although still not cheap) as a more complete solution.
I think it's worth a try, and the 30 day trial period should be enough to run it on a number of images to get a feeling for how to tweak the automatically found solutions.
Those are my initial thoughts after a few hours of looking at some images, but I still need to do a much more in-depth analysis of the deconvolution quality to make up my mind and reach a final conclusion.
Cheers,
Bart
