Eric,
A bit off topic here, but Diglloyd has reported on the use of deconvolution sharpening with Raw Developer (a Mac only raw converter) to offset the effect of the blur filter on the D3x to the degree that the micro-contrast rivals that of the Leica S2. Unfortunately, he is aware of no way to do this with current Adobe products. Do you have any comments?
Bart van der Wolf and his disciples (myself included) has been promoting deconvolution for some time, but the pundits on this forum always conveniently ignore the topic. The smart sharpen in Photoshop is a convolution technique, but no one seems to know how to use it properly.
Hi Bill,
Guilty as charged, I contacted Lloyd about deconvolution sharpening of the D3x conversion.
There are currently only a few options, but the free
RawTherapee one is certainly helpful. For those on a Mac OS platform there is
Raw developer (if one develops a Raw). My personal favorite (warts and all) is
FocusMagic because as a plugin it integrates so nicely with my workflow. As part of a Photoshop action it can be used on a sharpening layer that uses blend-if functionality to tweak the result, and one can even selectively use masks to avoid sharpening noise in blue skies.
The FM warts are that it hasn't been updated for quite a while (not that it needs it for functionality as a 32-bit plug-in), but there are some incompatibilities with some systems mabe due to memory issues (may well be the OS, not FM, but who knows?). The owners have recently re-confirmed to me that they will work on a 64-bit version, but they've been saying that for a long time, so I'm not too sure about the future. But when it works, it works fine. They did recently update the installer so that newer versions of Photoshop can be found for installation in the correct plugin folder.
Some of the newer
Topaz filters supposedly also use deconvolution sharpening. Photoshop's Smart sharpening uses something that looks like deconvolution, but is much less effective than FocusMagic.
Then there are astronomy programs like e.g.
IRIS and
ImagesPlus that allow to use deconvolution sharpening, and to specify one's own point spread functions. Also a tool like
MatLab has a few deconvolution methods as ready to use functions.
Cheers,
Bart