Hi Bart
I know you have been into deconvolution for several years and were very active on an old forum of the subject which sort of died away.
I have been using a new deconvolution processor "Franzis Sharpen" on my landscapes. The latest version was just updated today. I have been impressed with what they are accomplishing and would like to get your impressions of it. It still has scaling problems with the control icons on a 4K monitor but the image resolution is vastly improved over CaptureOne or PS, and it works very well as a plugin to DXO.
Hi Paul,
Yes, I also have that (the Sharpen Projects Professional edition) in my tool chest. I missed the update, so now I just updated to the latest version as well. I did not notice any obvious new features, so it probably is just a maintenance release.
The nice thing is that the Blind deconvolution handles so-called non-Isotropic blur (= not symmetric in all directions) automatically. The default region it uses to estimate the Point Spread Function (PSF) is usually a bit large, I usually have to reduce it to a radius of something like 10 to begin with, instead of 50 or 60 or so.
Also the default noise reduction is a bit much. Of course, I also maximize the quality setting, but that will make things a bit slower due to the required additional processing. Luckily the usage of the GPUs helps to keep processing times acceptable.
The automatic Photographic settings make it a bit hard to judge the sharpening settings in isolation, so I switch those off, and later may apply a bit of those (like dehaze) again.
The whole graphic user interface is a bit overwhelming and it looks rather technical, but it covers a lot of aspects, including selective masking. The Raw conversion quality is not good enough for my taste. It would be a good addition for those who cannot use Photoshop with plugins, because it is a stand-alone application.
So, all-in-all it does a good job but requires some tweaking of the parameters for better results than Automatic delivers.
Cheers,
Bart