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Author Topic: deconvolution sharpening plug in  (Read 54663 times)

TonyW

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #40 on: January 30, 2016, 07:38:12 pm »

Tim, should have taken more care I know but what I see on screen comparing Marc's post processed to my version of pre processed using Smart Sharpen looks very close indeed.  Had not realised that I had not embedded profile

As it is late I just uploaded the pre processed version again this time only used Smart Sharpen at the figures you see overlaid.  What I can say is that on screen at 100% view the two images are very close match.  But really the proof of the pudding should be in printing.

My concern about accuracy relates to the fact that the we/I am working on a JPEG which already has default sharpening applied.  And now it is being reapplied via CS6 to match another JPEG!

Anyway FWIW I am curious if CS5 Smart Sharpen the same or CS6 improved using the figures I quoted.

Hopefully by clicking on the image you will be taken to Photobucket where you can click on the magnify to get a full size image.  Marc I will remove this image whenever you want
 
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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #41 on: January 30, 2016, 10:23:21 pm »

You're not working from the 100% zoom crop that I'm talking about, Tony, so you're still not comparing apples to apples.

Here's the pre-sharpen version viewed from LuLa after clicking magnified next to your photobucket magnified.
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TonyW

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #42 on: January 31, 2016, 05:36:11 am »

Tim should have given clearer instructions re Photobucket.  TBH rarely put anything there over 1024 pixels.  :-[

To see the full 3089 x 2059 pixel after clicking on the magnify icon on the first screen you need to right click this new image and select View Image from the menu.  Your new view will present the image with a grey surround and your cursor will turn into a '+' magnifier. Click this and you should get a 100% view - phew  ???

Two examples attached.  First original pre sharpening next to deconvolution only.  Second original post sharpened version next to deconvolution only

EDIT:Changed the Post_DeconOnly image as saved with wrong profile
« Last Edit: January 31, 2016, 06:50:24 am by TonyW »
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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #43 on: January 31, 2016, 02:28:13 pm »

I concede, Tony, you're right. Smart Sharpen did a better job of bringing out more micro-fine detail which basically gives the appearance of improving lens acutance and resolution. The micro-fine granular artifacts will soften up and blur upon upsampling.

In fact last night I was attempting to get this granular high frequency detail in a flower image I shot years ago and processed under CS3 whose ACR version sharpening didn't have. The issue with CS5's version of Smart Sharpen and even ACR 6.7 Detail panel is that even though I could get fine detail in the flower petal I had to accept the noise in the background so when doing my upsampling test I got these polka-dot artifacts from the noise while the actual petal detail looked correct. But it took forever squeezing all the detail I could get adjusting all the sliders. It got to where I couldn't distinguish noise from actual captured detail viewing at 100%. But then I was working on a 6MP image.
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TonyW

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #44 on: January 31, 2016, 03:39:35 pm »

Glad to hear finally arrived at a satisfactory comparison Tim.   :)

Sorry it took me so long to get there (being a bit lazy this week!) and thanks for your patience.  Although I was confident of what I was seeing and producing I really should have just taken more care when presenting as a comparison and you were quite right to point out my shortfalls.

For me it was not a question of trying to prove that one method or application better than another but where one application scored higher could I get the same with my current toolset i.e. CS6 without plugins.
 
Still not entirely happy with the outcome from Smart Sharpen. 
One round of sharpening pushing the JPEG to nearly breaking point is perhaps not the smart way to go about testing sharpening.  The fact of applying to a JPEG in the first instance is likely to lead to tears  :'(

I still think that a more considered approach using a first round of capture sharpening leading through creative sharpening and final output sharpening would have been better way but to do that I would really want to be working from a 16 bit TIFF or raw file.

I don't think it fair to make any judgement based on one image test either for CS6 or Piccure+.  I am sure there is more to be gained from both.

I don't know about anyone else but what I want from these products is to be totally blown away.  For my eyes to bleed with the sharpness, for euphoria induced by no noise other than what I require.  8) ;D

One thing that does look promising is the motion blur correction.  The image presented on the website Taj Mahal I do not think I could get anywhere near with CS6.  Although there does appear to be ghosting left behind this could be cleaned up in CS6.

So I have decided I must see first hand and have downloaded the trial and also a screen grab of the before and after.

From what you say it looks like CS6 smart sharpen improved over CS5 and from what I have heard has been further improved in CC - I think increase sharpening potential with less noise increase.

I am desperately trying to resist the siren call of CC, not sure how long I can hold out  :-\
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picc_pl

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #45 on: January 31, 2016, 04:04:07 pm »

One technical comment from my side: it makes a very big difference whether you use piccure+ on JPGs or RAW images. There are a few reasons for this:
- piccure+ determines a different aberration for every pixel of the image (non-gaussian) based on the image itself. Technically this is called "reverse spatially-varying optical aberrations through blind deconvolution". This involves two steps: determining those aberrations and reversing them.
- For JPGs there are three problems: 1) the image is usually sharpened by the camera and 2) every color channel only has 256 colors (8-bit) and 3) there are compression artefacts. Determining those optical aberrations is negatively affected by all those three factors. Reversing those aberrations thus becomes more difficult. piccure+ determines each pixel based on the information of several hundred surrounding pixels. The quality of the rendering largely depends on how accurately the assumptions in the model were.
- TIF have several advantages: 16-bit per color channel allow a much finer and more accurate estimation of the blur - in addition the blur is not affected by artefacts or presharpening (as opposed to JPG). This is why we (highly) recommend using TIF /RAW images. It really makes a big difference.

From my personal experience I'd say that the shake reduction (Motion+) works fairly decent on JPGs as well - but you don't get the same quality in Lens+ if you apply it to JPGs compared to TIFs. The observations made that the corrections applied by piccure+ vary across the image plane are correct - that is the secret sauce that makes the difference and the computation so much more complex.

And the effect really depends on your gear and shooting habits. But the difference between JPG and TIF is so significant, so I wanted to point that out... If you shoot JPG because you need the 10 frames/second it doesn't help that "some software may give a good improvement it you just did 3 fps". Aside from piccure+ - I can only recommend anybody to shoot RAW. I didn't do that for a long time - until I realised how much editing capabilities vanish if you don't... And software develops and matures - so things suddenly become possible. Having more than 8-bit can really make a big difference (artefacts and sharpening aside).

Best,
Lui
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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #46 on: January 31, 2016, 11:25:26 pm »

Lui, can piccure+ increase granularity as shown in Tony's micro-fine rock detail example of Marc's 100% Phase One crop? Is there a slider or setting you'ld suggest to bring out more detail?

Also you say to shoot Raw which most of us including myself exclusively do but Piccure+ doesn't work parametrically on Raw data as a LR plugin but only on the tiff conversion of the Raw. And I and most others agree that 16bit tiff is second best to working directly on the Raw version, but there are incamera jpegs set to high quality that can produce as good as a tiff without compression artifacts where noise and noise suppression artifacts baked in are far worse issues. I do know now though that even when I have to resort to editing those jpegs I'ld rather first save as a 16bit tiff before parametrically working on them in ACR/LR which can be done automatically upon opening or importing.
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TonyW

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #47 on: February 01, 2016, 07:15:13 am »

Hi Lui,

Your comments about working on JPEG are exactly what concerned me working on Marc's posted image and the fact is that I did not think that real conclusions could be drawn from this comparison - ideally we should be working on better data from raw or 16 bit TIFF. 

When I have looked at posted befores and afters usually in my mind is how do I achieve the same with my current toolset (and knowledge) thereby saving money (ok cheapskate I know  ???).  Generally if I can get close to correcting a JPEG I am fairly confident I can do the same or better with a better set of data using my current tools. 

I have to say I do not like breaking the raw workflow to spawn a TIFF for further work, as with many images I can stay within LR and produce pretty good results directly through to output.  Of course there are times when I need the help of PS and at these times can see the value of some third party plugins.

Not had time to try Piccure+ fully yet but one thing I did try was the motion correction.  Not having anything of my own to try (either I never get them or they are immediately trashed - your call on this  ;)) I grabbed the uncorrected Taj Mahal images shown on your website.  Not reading any help or manual (that's for sissies  ;D) set about adjusting the sliders.  First thoughts were I must have got it wrong and used the corrected version, will try again in the morning.

I have tried several different deblur applications over the years with mixed results - ok if you need to decipher a car number plate but not much use in producing a good image.

Trying the image again showed that my first try was correct.  In short the application did a great job even working from a relatively small JPEG grabbed from screen.  Not tried anything else recently and I do not think I would be able to get anywhere near with CS6.  While there were a few ghosting artifacts (maybe possible to minimise once application understood) the overall result certainly impressed me and the artifacts could be repaired anyway using Photoshop CS6.

I have included a screen capture of this mornings try.  I hope this in order, of course if not I will remove at your request

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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #48 on: February 01, 2016, 08:15:25 am »

Lui, can piccure+ increase granularity as shown in Tony's micro-fine rock detail example of Marc's 100% Phase One crop? Is there a slider or setting you'ld suggest to bring out more detail?

Hi Tim,

While the restoration is quite effective, it seems like there is something else going on besides plain deconvolution. But maybe that is due to the tests I had to do on the JPEG version, and Marc had a TIFF at his disposal, and due to the specific settings that were used with Piccure+.

Quote
Also you say to shoot Raw which most of us including myself exclusively do but Piccure+ doesn't work parametrically on Raw data as a LR plugin but only on the tiff conversion of the Raw. And I and most others agree that 16bit tiff is second best to working directly on the Raw version, ...


Just to make sure, most (parametric) photo-editors do not work on the Raw data either, they just postpone the export of the final image and recalculate for display. So the only benefit they have is that they can do a number of operations in linear gamma space, without having to convert down and up again.

Quote
... but there are incamera jpegs set to high quality that can produce as good as a tiff without compression artifacts where noise and noise suppression artifacts baked in are far worse issues.

JPEGs are in principle always lossy (irreversibly) compressed (the color channels are truncated in precision). What is lost cannot be used for deconvolution, and these compression artifacts will get amplified by deconvolution. There are some JPEG libraries that also allow lossless compression, but they are not all that common.

Cheers,
Bart
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== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

marcmccalmont

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #49 on: February 03, 2016, 05:27:42 am »

full resolution TIFF "All Rights Reserved Marc McCalmont" for personal use only
feel free to download and sharpen as you wish
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l7yiwno9byp8a54/AADTayz3cO6npoLiLY9tvSy8a?dl=0
Marc
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Marc McCalmont

Hening Bettermann

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #50 on: February 03, 2016, 08:08:23 am »

I hope to find the time to explore Piccure+ a little further. First off, I have a question to the developers concerning the install process. 

I tried to install it on my Desktop Mac. During the install process, there was an alert,  something like "The 'Rez' component requires the Developer command line tool to be installed. Do you want to install it now?" I clicked 'yes', thinking the tool might be included in the install package. But it looked like the installer tried to find the tool via the Internet and couldn't, since that computer is not connected to the Internet. None the less, it said that the install was successful.

Then I installed it on the MacBook, which has Internet access. Here was no alert about any Developer tools. But nor was there any sign that anything was downloaded during the install. Also here, the install was called successful.

So what am I to believe? Can I exspect the Rez component to work on the MacBook? Or what shall I do to be sure?

« Last Edit: February 03, 2016, 02:54:53 pm by Hening Bettermann »
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TonyW

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #51 on: February 03, 2016, 08:20:38 am »

Marc,

First a big thank you for sharing your raw images for personal use very generous. 

The subject matter is ideal with  plenty of nice edges and detail and a bonus of the same subject with the Nikon D800e and the Phase One back.  As good as the D800e is the Phase One IQ is a real step up.  Problem now is I want one  ;D  Excellent images and I will be playing with sharpening soon, hoping to identify which is your boat  ;D

BTW.  Loved the Bryce image and the way you caught the light giving such a great sense of depth with the colour . 
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marcmccalmont

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #52 on: February 03, 2016, 10:32:56 am »

Marc,

First a big thank you for sharing your raw images for personal use very generous. 

The subject matter is ideal with  plenty of nice edges and detail and a bonus of the same subject with the Nikon D800e and the Phase One back.  As good as the D800e is the Phase One IQ is a real step up.  Problem now is I want one  ;D  Excellent images and I will be playing with sharpening soon, hoping to identify which is your boat  ;D

BTW.  Loved the Bryce image and the way you caught the light giving such a great sense of depth with the colour .

My boat is the biggest one of course :)
Some day I'd love the IQ3 100 for the real live view and long exposures but I'm very happy with the IQ180 and love my Rhodenstock HR lenses, It's really fun to shoot with a technical camera.
The Bryce image was one I took several years ago and when reviewing some RAW's I noticed it among the pile of Bryce shots, I like the tree in the foreground adding a little color and interest.
Marc
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Marc McCalmont

Hening Bettermann

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #53 on: February 03, 2016, 02:46:46 pm »

While waiting for a solution to the Rez problem, I installed Piccure+ as a plug-in for PhotoLine (because the stand-alone app is for batch processing only). The plug-in was recognised without problems. Opening an image (in ProPhoto) showed a gross color shift in the sky, see screen shot. I tried to process the image, thinking maybe this color shift might only be in the preview. But the processing failed with error "Could not create '/Applications/Piccure+/Profiles' folder."
MacOSX 10.10.5
No I'm NOT trying to badmouth Piccure+. I'm seriously interested in exploring it further.
« Last Edit: February 03, 2016, 02:53:00 pm by Hening Bettermann »
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picc_pl

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #54 on: February 03, 2016, 03:30:07 pm »

Hi,

always feel free to contact support (support@piccure.zendesk.com) if you have any questions - as I don't really regularly check forums.
Currently, you get this error message in piccure+, if you are not signed in as Administrator, as piccure+ stores the project files in the Applications folder. This is not optimal and we will change this with the next release. This problem does not occur in the plugin version.

Regarding the color: I think you may be using a color space that is not genuinely supported in the Preview. Does the saved image show the same color mismatch? Which color profile are you using?
Best,
Lui
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Hening Bettermann

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #55 on: February 03, 2016, 03:37:31 pm »

Hi Lui,
thank you for your fast reply. So I'll move the discussion about technical problems of this kind to your support.
Best - Hening.

TonyW

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #56 on: February 03, 2016, 03:41:00 pm »

Hi Henning
Don't know about Mac but it may be related to your version.  According to Piccure site you should be on Mac 10.6.8 or later  http://relaunch.piccureplus.com/

The standalone version will operate on just one image at least in Windows
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Hening Bettermann

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #57 on: February 03, 2016, 04:15:13 pm »

Hi Lui,
regarding the color shift, it was as we both suspected, it is only in the preview (I was able to process after equipping myself with admin privileges). The original image was in ProPhoto.
I'll contact support concerning the Rez issue.

Hi Tony,
thanks for your comment. I'm on MacOSX 10.10.5.
Concerning developing just one image in the standalone version: Yes I remember there was an answer to a FAQ that described a workaround to make this possible; but as is, there seems to be no problem for the plug-in to be recognised by PhotoLine - there shouldn't be, since PL uses the Adobe Common Plug-in Architecture.

Good light!

picc_pl

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #58 on: February 03, 2016, 04:45:49 pm »

I hope to find the time to explore Piccure+ a little further. First off, I have a question to the developers concerning the install process. 

I tried to install it on my Desktop Mac. During the install process, there was an alert,  something like "The 'Rez' component requires the Developer command line tool to be installed. Do you want to install it now?" I clicked 'yes', thinking the tool might be included in the install package. But it looked like the installer tried to find the tool via the Internet and couldn't, since that computer is not connected to the Internet. None the less, it said that the install was successful.

Then I installed it on the MacBook, which has Internet access. Here was no alert about any Developer tools. But nor was there any sign that anything was downloaded during the install. Also here, the install was called successful.

So what am I to believe? Can I exspect the Rez component to work on the MacBook? Or what shall I do to be sure?

Hello, thanks for sending us a support ticket as well - I really missed this one, sorry.
The "Developer Tools" are in essence libraries that are often shared among many programs - so in order to avoid that every program that relies on Apple components has to install it uniquely over and over again one can install the Developer Tools once for everybody. In order for piccure+ to work properly those tools are needed. I suppose in the first case you never had a program that required them installed on the computer - that is why you were prompted. I suppose the MacBook already had them installed previously - so it has less to do with internet connections but is rather a matter of whether you had them installed previously. The installer does not simply download files from the internet. I will check back with the developers in detail what it's exactly needed for.

Best,
Lui
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Hening Bettermann

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Re: deconvolution sharpening plug in
« Reply #59 on: February 09, 2016, 10:57:34 am »

Now the install is OK, and I have played around a little with some sharpening methods and learned something new: All imply more or less contrast boost, which is more or less local, and can lead to more or less clipping of shadows and/or highlights.

Here's another little test of Piccure+.
100% crops, screen shots from a Retina screen. Left to right: Unsharpened - Iridient Reveal at default settings - Piccure+ with Lens+, Quality+, Optical Correction Strong, Sharp 0.

It looks to me like Piccure+ has a little edge due to a stronger contrast boost.

The raw image was shot with a C/Y Planar 1.7/50 @f/16 on an a7r1, converted to 16 bit TIF in Iridient.
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