I've never gotten the auto feature to work either, Smart sharpen is almost as good so I'll use that until they have a 64bit version working, I hope they are not on there way out of business?
Marc
The web site is still up and running. I also hope they aren't out of business, but this change in responsiveness from "very" to "un-" worries me.
I haven't used Smart Sharpen in CS4 (because my present machine turns out to be so underpowered that CS4 just dies a painful death on it; and I have to hand it to Adobe: when CS4 dies, it basically takes the entire operating system with it --- nice work there, Adobe; there aren't many applications that can claim to do that).
Smart Sharpen in CS2 was ok, but couldn't hold a candle to Focus Fixer. The appeal of FF, to me, was always that its sharpening (unless overdone) never has that "sharpened by software" look about it. Instead, it actually does look like the difference between "slightly out of focus" and "in perfect focus." I am willing to live with the glacial processing speed because these results are so outstanding. The only application I've seen doing a better job is the DxO raw converter's "lens softness" correction, which is instantaneous rather than glacially slow -- and can make a stunning difference. But of course that requires a specific sensor+lens module -- supplied only by DxO's authors themselves. The good news: the modules are free. The bad news: there aren't enough of them and there might be some they will never make. So if no module is available, you're limited in DxO to using unsharp masking, which comes in a very poor second (or third). You can do most of their lens-aberration corrections manually in the absence of a module -- but the special sharpening functionality
requires a module. <sigh>
If the FF guys aren't going to support 64-bit any time soon, I have the feeling they're going to suffer in lost sales. 'Cuz everyone else is likely to start supporting it if they aren't already, eh?
