Adobe MAX 2011 - Photoshop Image Deblurring sneak - Wow!

[Fine_Art]

The PSF in the hubble was estimated based on point source stars. It was not good enough. If you remember they put together another mission at high expense to install corrective hardware. If you remember the video of the astronauts doing a spacewalk installation of the "glasses for the telescope" was on the news.

Would they have done that if they could just do it in software? No.

[Fine_Art]

This article put the cost of the mission at 1.5 billion $. 1.3 was just the space shuttle.
http://www.company7.com/c7news/nasa_sts61.html

A supercomputer would have been cheaper if it could work. If all the brainiacs at NASA couldn't do it for a billion $, what are the chances it will be in the next photoshop upgrade for $300? Its obscene snake oil salesmanship.

[Fine_Art]

To be more precise on "clarity", it is a color contrast stretch. A normal contrast enhancement stretches the luminance channel. Clarity stretches the color channel. There is nothing special about it.

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Yes, but if you have missed your picture the best alternative is probably to use deconvolution. NASA can afford to modify the telescope in space and reshoot the pictures, but for a photographer the exact subject is normally gone.

Best regards
Erik

This article put the cost of the mission at 1.5 billion $. 1.3 was just the space shuttle.
http://www.company7.com/c7news/nasa_sts61.html

A supercomputer would have been cheaper if it could work. If all the brainiacs at NASA couldn't do it for a billion $, what are the chances it will be in the next photoshop upgrade for $300? Its obscene snake oil salesmanship.

[Fine_Art]

Hi,

Yes, but if you have missed your picture the best alternative is probably to use deconvolution. NASA can afford to modify the telescope in space and reshoot the pictures, but for a photographer the exact subject is normally gone.

Best regards
Erik

You say that like you think a billion has no value to them. If it could be done perfectly in software they would have done it. Adobe reversing a known PSF and presenting it as an upcoming product is fraud. They could have taken a mild shake then done an approximate fix. They knew the crowd would not be roaring with delight. They chose to present a fraud. A real product will never be able to do that.

[Brian Gilkes]

I don't know  to stop all this misrepresentation. Software floggers, politicians, priests,  bankers- on it goes.It remains to be seen if street marching does anything but replace one lot of crooks with another.  All I can think of is try and do without, if not possible buy another product and lock up or redistribute immoral funds gained by anyone proved to be lying, manipulating, molesting, slaving, invading, stealing,bullying, ruining cultures/ environment/ health/ childhood/intelligence.
Start at the top , not with minions, couriers, petty salesmen, bank clerks, local politicians, foot soldiers etc. I know, I know . They have the money, they pay the lawyers and own the press. Back to photography. For a start don't buy any software or hardware unless it improves  your work and does what it claims to. Investigate alternatives.Don't assume big must be best. If rigour proves without reasonable doubt the product or it's hype is a con , tell everyone. Got to start somewhere.

[Tim Lookingbill]

To be more precise on "clarity", it is a color contrast stretch. A normal contrast enhancement stretches the luminance channel. Clarity stretches the color channel. There is nothing special about it.

Where am I seeing improvements between your two cash register shots, Fine_Art? They look almost identical. None look blurred. What was your point in posting those two images?

The link below to one of my images in my "Jpeg VS Raw" folder gallery will show a more pronounced improvement in what I'm talking about similar to what you've demonstrated in your images. I agree there is a difference between Clarity and Blurry but not how you describe it.

Blurry is either movement induced or narrow "Bokeh" DOF induced or just out of focus. It's all about bringing back the "Mach Band" (explained in link below) effect our human optics use to judge clarity and sharpness by. It's just contrast/clarity starts at the micro fine edge and radiates out to broader tonal variances as shown in the flower image. Blur broadens the tonal roll off between contrast variances.

I don't know where or how you correlate luminance and color channels from in determining Clarity. Maybe you're referring to how algorithms handle it. Not sure.

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=12334632

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/unsharp-mask.htm ...scroll down to gradient for Mach Band.

[Fine_Art]

1024 is the largest size flickr will let me post. If you look carefully you will see detail enhanced. Ill put crops in as attachments. Sorry, i should have checked to see how well the difference shows.

[Fine_Art]

So from those you should be able to see a clear improvement from selecting in the picture. There was a clear shake from the button press. It is not a perfect deconvolution by any means. It also tends to create some artifacts that become enhanced from spots of noise. With this adaptive RL version you can select the noise cutoff. I usually go with 5 standard deviations on the slider. The artifacts aren't really noticeable unless you are pixel peeping. On the overall picture you should see clear differences on the vertical faces facing forward. Look at the bottom. A the top. Look at the zigzags in the thistles.

A USM will find an edge then increase the contrast. An edge that is not sharp really needs the width of the edge fixed not the amplitude. A deconvolution shrinks the diameter of edges. If you run too many iterations it creates dark ring craters around edges. It starts to look like USM but it is different. It is like taking a pile of sand and moving it into a taller thinner pile. Too much makes a crater around it.

I opened the original again, here is the speck of dust I selected with the custom PSF shown. As you can see it is a blur point. Using this software you can pick these things. Look at how the numbers are not symmetrical around the peak. Using a standard Gaussian would be inferior.

[Tim Lookingbill]

Again, I don't see a big difference compared to what PierreVandevenne's deconvolution links demonstrate including what I did with the white flower (did you even look at the white flower-you seem to be talking past me).

The kind of improvements you're espousing requires you DO have to pixel peep to see it and it isn't anything better than what I can accomplish with a combination of Curves, Clarity, Sharpening, a custom camera profile, HSL, and Contrast tweaks in Adobe Camera Raw.

Here's a 100% crop ACR preview of what I'm talking about.

[Fine_Art]

I did look at the white flower. It looks completely artificial. What is your point? It has nothing to do with debluring an image. It doesnt even look like a rose, it looks like a 3D studio max creation.

As posted on DPR the Plaza shot was also rigged. The blur on the left is supposed long exposure motion blur. Look at the legs on the improved image. There is no motion in the walking legs.

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/files/2011/10/Plaza.png

[Tim Lookingbill]

I'm done with you.

Pinning you down on your logic is like playing wack-a-mole.

[Fine_Art]

You clearly have no comprehension on what the demo was supposed to be demonstrating. Your grainy coins do not look sharp, they look contrast enhanced.

[Fine_Art]

This is what a rose is supposed to look like. Your looks like it could be a plaster sculpture.

[Fine_Art]

I did a quick conversion of a white rose to compare to your method.

My Rose


Your Rose


Which looks more realistic?

[Tim Lookingbill]

Which looks more realistic?

Mine.

Yours looks soft, murky and hazy looking and I'm viewing on an X-rite calibrated display.

You weren't in that garden when I shot that white flower. The clarity, brilliance and intensity from a crispy 10 AM morning sunlight was overwhelming and that is what I tried to convey in the final rendering based on my memory and emotional response of that scene.

[Fine_Art]

Did you rub it with carbon paper? What is the black stuff?

[Tim Lookingbill]

The black stuff is a result of reducing saturation to -50 for both orange and yellow channels in ACR's HSL panel. ACR's interpretation of my camera's Auto WB tends to be on the warm side and I do remember the flowers having an off white appearance but not yellow/orange as in the unedited jpeg. If I were to reduce saturation to make the flower more neutral by adjusting WB then the entire image would be too blue. That's the neat thing about that panel in that it can do some unexpected things to the images color table just by playing around.

I'll admit I took liberties in rendering the flower and went overboard with local contrast sharpening in Photoshop which over emphasized the Mach Band effect (similar to over cranked tonemapping in HDR). My eyes tend to adapt to the appearance of clarity where I tend to not see this as I'm editing.

It was mainly to see just how much clarity I could bring out in such a soft image.

It was shot at f/16 with a cheap kit lens that induces diffraction at that aperture.

Below is the non-Photoshop sharpened version straight out of ACR, but showing what would've happened if I used WB adjust instead of reduce orange and yellow saturation to make the rose more neutral.

 

[PierreVandevenne]

I think there are arguments for both sides: at the time the Hubble fix was launched, the fastest super computer was the Connexion Machine 5 - at about 1.5 millions per node, some of the fast machines having 512 nodes and delivering 60 GFlops. That's about what you get from a current mid to high level i7, and less than what you'd get from GPUs. For about $30000, knowledgeable users can build stuff that runs in the hundreds of teraflops range (most notably this http://web.hpu4science.org/ - and yes, one of the goal was deconvolution). So the computional abilities have increased tremendously and that has to be taken into account. Algorithms have made some progress as well, if not a a fundamental level - there is data loss after all and I don't think any way to RE a multiple factors PSF has been proven - simply because some of the paths are now become practical.

I think it is reasonable to say that Adobe's demo is a bit misleading, but then they don't claim it is ready and universal. And it is also fair to say that a generic, automatic, one size fits all sources of loss, deconvolution algorithm leading to images satisfying photographers is a very very distant perspective.

BTW, I've always found the "content aware fill" buzz a bit ironic because in essence it is the same phenomenon that the demoes exploit: give us a couple of well chosen test cases and our minds automatically fill the vast void between them with the expectation that it will work for all images...

And any way, I would venture to say that, as soon as there are three photographers in one room, there isn't a single issue that is consensual

[EricV]

Adobe reversing a known PSF and presenting it as an upcoming product is fraud. They could have taken a mild shake then done an approximate fix. They knew the crowd would not be roaring with delight. They chose to present a fraud. A real product will never be able to do that.

This is a bigger mis-representation of the situation than Adobe's "cheat".  According to Adobe, the first two images were real camera shake.  The third image was simulated camera shake, but the reconstruction program was not given the simulation PSF.