Adobe MAX 2011 - Photoshop Image Deblurring sneak - Wow!

[Josh-H]

You Tube Video of the Sneak - pretty impressive stuff!

[francois]

I saw it this morning and was ask very very impressed...

[walter.sk]

I've been using Focus Magic, although it only works in 32-bit Photoshop, and Topaz Refocus.  The Adobe Max 2011 looks like focus Magic on double steroids!

[Graham Mitchell]

I wish the video was clearer.

It also seemed that this method applied to camera shake only. The map which popped up after the analysis showed the distribution of a data point over the time of the exposure. There was nothing about simple missed focus or poor lens quality, etc.

Still, deconvolution is an exciting prospect. I look forward to seeing where this goes.

[AFairley]

Wow, I like!

[sniper]

It's a shame the person videoing it hasn't got access to it.

[Brian Gilkes]

Many of us have been using deconvolution for years. Unfortunately for Mac users most of the software comes from the astrophysics area who seem to be partial to Windows. It will be interesting to see how Adobe is handling it. The calculations and iterations required take up a lot of processing time . Perhaps Adobe have found some solution. Blur has numerous causes and requires different strategies. For example the Richardson -Lucy algorithm is usually most favoured but the Van Cittert can come through a winner in some situations. Adobe is very good at whizz bang demos that sometimes don't quite match product performance.

[Tim Gray]

Many of us have been using deconvolution for years. Unfortunately for Mac users most of the software comesfrom the astrophysics area who seem to be partial to Windows. It will be interesting to see how Adobe is handling it. The calculations and iterations required take up a lot of processing time . Perhaps Adobe have found some solution. Blur has numerous causes and requires different strategies. For example the Richardson -Lucy algorithm is usually most favoured but the Van Cittert can come through a winner in some situations. Adobe is very good at whizz bang demos that sometimes don't quite match product performance.

As exampled by the "I'll just select a group of parameters" part of the demo.

[Geraldo Garcia]

Exactly!

It is not a "new technology", but for sure is new to Photoshop and very welcome if it works properly.
As one of the presenters pointed, the "content aware fill" caused a similar fuss on the sneak preview, but I think it ended up being useless.

[Ben Rubinstein]

content aware fill is anything but useless!

[Geraldo Garcia]

content aware fill is anything but useless!

Well...

I guess I should have said "useless to my needs".
To me the bottom line is: It does not make my life easier as I still have to do a lot of manual work to make the image acceptable. I find that it only works perfectly on about 5% of the images, on all the rest I still have to do a lot of work to remove artefacts and to ease transitions, so much work that would be faster to clone and heal manually.

[craigwashburn]

Well...

I guess I should have said "useless to my needs".
To me the bottom line is: It does not make my life easier as I still have to do a lot of manual work to make the image acceptable. I find that it only works perfectly on about 5% of the images, on all the rest I still have to do a lot of work to remove artefacts and to ease transitions, so much work that would be faster to clone and heal manually.

Complete agreement.  I once used it to successfully extend a body of water, and it did ok at lining up ripples, but lots of artifacts remained to be cleaned up.  Adobe's magic software demos never quite hold up in the real world usage.

[PierreVandevenne]

Many of us have been using deconvolution for years. Unfortunately for Mac users most of the software comes from the astrophysics area who seem to be partial to Windows. It will be interesting to see how Adobe is handling it. The calculations and iterations required take up a lot of processing time . Perhaps Adobe have found some solution. Blur has numerous causes and requires different strategies. For example the Richardson -Lucy algorithm is usually most favoured but the Van Cittert can come through a winner in some situations. Adobe is very good at whizz bang demos that sometimes don't quite match product performance.

Indeed. The advantage for Lucy Richardson in astronomical imaging is that you either know the PSF because you have incredibly precise and well calibrated instruments (even if you implement the initial design somewhat wrongly cf Hubble) or you have a reasonable way to reverse engineer it from a supposedly perfect point source, a "just enough but not too much exposed star". Approximation is the key here,as Wikipedia puts it "It has been shown empirically that if this iteration converges, it converges to the maximum likelihood solution for uj." empirically and if being keywords here. It's always been, at least for me, a matter of trial and errors and multiple attempts. And let's not even talk about the role of noise, who should just be the right kind when you RE the PSF.

But there are other techniques and since one of the author of the paper works at Adobe that could be what they use.

http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~leojia/projects/motion_deblurring/index.html
http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~leojia/projects/motion_deblurring/deblur_siggraph08.pdf

There's an exe there you can try. I did when I first read the paper, with mixed results.

[madmanchan]

More info here:

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html

[Fine_Art]

This is already in another thread. I can make a custom PSF, blur an image, then reverse it. I can improve an image with a partial PSF, then improve it more with another partial. I had to do this on a picture where a buffalo started running.

If you want adaptive richardson-lucy now, use images plus. If you want van cittert now, use images plus. If you want custom PSFs now, use images plus. If you want adaptive smoothing that will preserve fine detail ... you guessed it.

Let me know when it can figure out the psf on the fly. Then i will buy photoshop.

[Fine_Art]

Hows about focus stacking in macro, an area where software help would be greatly appreciated.

Here I stopped on the leg as it got artifacts. You can keep on going to focus the body.

[Fine_Art]

Custom deconvolution now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D6-BTRivG8&feature=player_detailpage

Before


After

[Tim Lookingbill]

Fine_Art, that's some nice work there, but I don't see how it compares with the improvements shown in the links provided by Eric Chan and others.

The image of the antique cash register looks to be just a lens induced diffraction type clarity issue which you can easily fix in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. I've done it on 100's of images in ACR.

[Fine_Art]

I guess you havent been following the Adobe Max story, They faked one of the pictures. Its on DPR, Adobe's own blog, TOP, etc. They used a known PSF to blur it then used the same PSF to deblur it perfectly. You can never get that in a real test. They presented it as "This is what we are working on, this is what you can expect in a future product with your pictures". It is a lie. It is impossible to perfectly know the PSF from an image.

What you don't understand about that image (probably from the low res video) is it was hand held in a museum. The mild shake was real. I selected a small spot of dust in the image for the program to determine a PSF. It then took the smear reversing it back to (close to) a point source. This is not clarity, which is just local contrast enhancement, it is like a corrective lens (glasses).

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

It is not impossible to know the PSF. For instance, the Hubble space telescope had some problem with it's mirror and it could be corrected because the PSF was known. Sometimes PSF can be estimated from the image.

Best regards
Erik

I guess you havent been following the Adobe Max story, They faked one of the pictures. Its on DPR, Adobe's own blog, TOP, etc. They used a known PSF to blur it then used the same PSF to deblur it perfectly. You can never get that in a real test. They presented it as "This is what we are working on, this is what you can expect in a future product with your pictures". It is a lie. It is impossible to perfectly know the PSF from an image.

What you don't understand about that image (probably from the low res video) is it was hand held in a museum. The mild shake was real. I selected a small spot of dust in the image for the program to determine a PSF. It then took the smear reversing it back to (close to) a point source. This is not clarity, which is just local contrast enhancement, it is like a corrective lens (glasses).