Topaz InFocus

[Colorado David]

Is anyone using it?  I'd like some personal experience.  I'm not interested in recovering badly focused shots.  I just want the best sharpening plug-in for already focused photos.  thanks very much.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Is anyone using it?  I'd like some personal experience.  I'm not interested in recovering badly focused shots.  I just want the best sharpening plug-in for already focused photos.  thanks very much.

Hi David,

For capture sharpening it works fine, it's just that many people don't use the correct radius settting. When using too large a radius, then artifacts are hard to avoid, but that's more a user problem. After setting the correct capture sharpening radius, the plug-in then allows to increase the effect by using the additional more traditional sharpening options of the plug-in.

Of course, finding the correct radius is not all that straightforward, that's why I created a tool for that purpose. By using my tool one can also create and apply a deconvolution kernel for free, but it requires some serious work to achieve perfection (it's a bit more laborious than using the TopazLabs plug-in).

Cheers,
Bart

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

My take is that Smart Sharpen in PS using settings like below works fine.

Best regards
Erik

[bill t.]

On relatively sharp printing glossy canvas I can not see any difference at all between my best efforts with Smart Sharpen and In Focus, when printing at about 192 original camera pixels per inch.  But In Focus may offer some benefits when blowing up very low resolution originals.

Also, In Focus can be very slow when working on multi gigabyte files and requires quite a bit of core memory compared to Smart Sharpen.  Unless you have free memory at least equal to the image size, you can easily wind up in the dreaded 100% memory usage pit for extended periods of time.