Railfan Technology > Picture sharpening tool?

Is there an computer program which can sharpen the focus of a digital picture? Examples?

I've used FocusMagic with great results. You can download it and try it for 10 images for free and then must get the key. Costs #45.00 US IIRC. Bob

I usually just use the sharpening tool in "Adobe Camera RAW" (RAW files).

Bob

dougd Wrote:
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> Is there an computer program which can sharpen the
> focus of a digital picture? Examples?


Do you have any type of computer software, that came with your camera?

Most have some sort of a sharpening tool...

Picasa is a freebie, works great for organizing, editing (limited, but includes a sharpening tool) from Google.

Why type of camera do you have?

No one else has jumped in here so.... A good read in a book or on the net would be in order as I don't think it is possible to go through a complex subject here.

Briefly as only a start:

Focus Magic aside as I am not familiar with that product.

You do not sharpen camera focus or motion blur in a photo editing program.
What the sharpening tools do is use perceptual tricks to "sharpen" an image which has lost sharpness through the digital process. I Don't understand all the tech stuff but I think to some extent you can look at the problem as representing straight lines with round pixels.
Lot more than that and it seems you can continue to read until at some point of detail you will get lost.

So with basic photo editing if your image is out of focus or has motion blur at best you might be able to help it a little but in theory there is no help.

I don't know about advanced tool like focus magic but I will guess there are some types of tradeoffs and it will work better with one type of image. They talk about forensic enhancement but obviously for artistic purposes you may look for different results.

Bob

Quite a few digital cameras on the lower end (snapshot/daisy-picker models up into some advanced amateur models) actually perform a degree of sharpening *in-camera* and *automatically*.

If you're a marketing/sales person, then this is great; it keeps you competitive with others whose models do the same thing, and the pleasant but mostly-clueless consumers who make up most of your buying demographic aren't complaining of blurry pix on the cameras' default settings. ('Subject motion' or 'camera shake' is another matter. ;) )

However, if you're a photographer this can be anything from "eh, whatever" to bad news. You want to retain full creative control about when the sharpening occurs, and to what extent. A native digital capture is going to be sharper than a scanned negative or slide. Don't unintentionally go too far with that by not knowing your camera! Check your owner's manual and if possible, disable that feature.

It's recommended that you use your image-editing program of choice to sharpen an image only *after* you make adjustments (for tones, contrast, color balance, as needed) and then set your final image size. You definitely don't want to sharpen right away and then resize the image. Indeed, sharpening should be used only on a "working" copy of the image, such as one destined to be saved as a JPEG and shown online or printed. Don't sharpen your "original" version, whether the format is RAW or TIFF or PSD. This is important because the amount of sharpening that's typically needed to make an image look pleasing on your monitor is *overkill* for printing purposes. You want to keep your options open for an original picture file's future uses by keeping it saved without sharpening, only performing that step once you are presented with a need to use a copy of that image for a particular purpose.

Some RAW converters have an option to sharpen the image solely for viewing purposes while previewing it. Be sure not to accidentally toggle it so that the program sharpens for real before saving! I've made that mistake to my sorrow, only realizing it once I had already saved the original file. There's no going back from that kind of fiasco, so double-check the default settings on your RAW converter.

> Some RAW converters have an option to sharpen the
> image solely for viewing purposes while previewing
> it. Be sure not to accidentally toggle it so that
> the program sharpens for real before saving! I've
> made that mistake to my sorrow, only realizing it
> once I had already saved the original file.
> There's no going back from that kind of fiasco, so
> double-check the default settings on your RAW
> converter.


Good post but.... , any work done in the RAW Converter should never be permanent.
There is an adjustment file that contains all your RAW commands and this can be eliminated by
1) delete the adjustment file
2) moving the RAW file to another folder etc.

Now there may be a RAW converter that makes changes to the original but that generally i don't think that is the case.

If you think about it that makes sense because once you would make actual changes to a RAW file it would no longer be a RAW file and also could no longer be read as a RAW file by other programs if one one program would imbed changes into it.

Bob

There is a photo editing program called Irfanview that has a photo sharpening command under "Image" in the top bar. It is downloadable for free.