A look at Piccure+ for sharpness

[keithcooper]

I use the TS-E17 and 24 quite a lot, and now have the EF11-24 to add to the wide collection - all great lenses

They're pretty sharp lenses to start with, but I've been testing Piccure+ as a plugin to 'fix' some aspects of lens softness.

It's not fast (over 5 mins on a 1Ds3 file), but the sharpening for lenses like a fully shifted TS-E17 is very good, and to my eye looks very much as you'd expect a 'better' lens to perform.

I've quite a few examples in some notes I've written up at: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/plugins/piccure_plus.html

Note for example, the shifted TS-E17 shot of Southwell Minster. The sharpening seems a lot more natural looking than many techniques I've tried

Like any such tool it needs some experimentation to see what works best, and how it affects other aspects of my RAW file to print workflow.
There are still some types of sharpening that I'll try with focus magic, but Piccure+ seems set to become part of my 'Big print' workflow.

[Jack Hogan]

Thanks Keith.  Do we know what deconvolution and filtering algorithm(s) it uses?

Jack

[bjanes]

Thanks Keith.  Do we know what deconvolution and filtering algorithm(s) it uses?

Jack

Piccure does look interesting. From a brief google search, I see that it is an antishake algorithm much like that incorporated into Photoshop CC. This author suggests that PSCC may actually be superior. A more detailed comparison would be interesting. Personally, I have not had much luck with the PS antishake algorithm in the few times that I have tried it.

Both algorithms appear to be some type of stochastic deconvolution, and the results would depend on how well the random walk that resulted in the blurring can be detected by the algorithm and corrected. Reviews of the PS implementation indicate that it works well with some image and poorly for others. Further discussion on this topic would be of interest.

Bill

[keithcooper]

I don't know about the sharpening algorithms I'm afraid, but it does look subtly different to many other sharpening tools I've tried.

Whatever it's doing, it manages to use a lot of processing power on my dual quad core Mac Pro.

The anti-shake side of the software was something I didn't test in so much detail. It seems to be very dependent on selecting a good sample point. For some images it was better than Focus Magic, and with others not so (I don't have PS CC)

[jrp]

Seems expensive £99 ...

[Mike Sellers]

I am testing this software and it is making an improvement in sharpness however after applying this program I applied Focus Magic and it came back with a blur width of 2 which made it even sharper. My question is would it be better to just apply FM to the file and skip Piccure altogether?
Mike

[keithcooper]

I am testing this software and it is making an improvement in sharpness however after applying this program I applied Focus Magic and it came back with a blur width of 2 which made it even sharper. My question is would it be better to just apply FM to the file and skip Piccure altogether?
Mike

The problem I found was that FM (a favourite of mine for years) applies the effects globally, whilst Piccure seems more selective (one reason I found it works well with shifted images). I used Piccure on a shot taken with the EF14 2.8L II this afternoon, which massively improved it, but still led to some residual softness towards the edges - this was indeed comfortably cleaned up with a masked application of FM.

For myself, the two packages work well for different aspects of sharpening

[Damon Lynch]

Bart posted a "relatively brief" (his words) and "highly detailed and very helpful" (my words) description of how to actually use InFocus 

I use Piccure+ regularly for it's sharpening. However experience tells me to look at the output carefully in case of artifacts on high contrast edges. They happen sometimes. I filed a bug report or two about it. Let's see if the developers can fix it.

[keithcooper]

Bart posted a "relatively brief" (his words) and "highly detailed and very helpful" (my words) description of how to actually use InFocus 

I use Piccure+ regularly for it's sharpening. However experience tells me to look at the output carefully in case of artifacts on high contrast edges. They happen sometimes. I filed a bug report or two about it. Let's see if the developers can fix it.

Thanks - I'd missed that.

These tools do need quite a bit of experimenting, but I like the fact that Piccure+ is not applying a blanket 'sharpen everything' effect. There are quite a few improvements to it I'd like to see, where the interface has a too simplified feel for a tool that is being aimed at the sorts of people likely to want to use it. Masking and returning results on a layer would be good to see for example.

It would be nice to fix the display colour management bug as well, but that's something that seems to elude quite a few plugin writers... ;-)