ePHOTOzine

FixerLabs launched FocusFixer 1.0 in April 2003. FocusFixer is the Photoshop plug-in that is destined to revolutionize the work of digital photographers by allowing, photographers to remove focus blur after the picture has been taken.

FocusFixer is a radical departure from the traditional methods of sharpening that are available in Photoshop. The most widely used, and effective, technique to date has been unsharp masking (USM). FocusFixer uses an innovative deconvolution technique to allow Photoshop to reverse the effects of focus blur, to "put photons back where they belong". Complex mathematical techniques that model the entire imaging process lie at the heart of FocusFixer. The processing itself is computationally demanding - many hundreds of times more so than USM - but modern desktop and laptop computers have several times the power of a 1980s Cray-1 supercomputer. FocusFixer uses this power and hides the complexity of the processing behind an elegantly simple user interface.

FocusFixer can achieve astonishing results beyond anything that USM or Smart Sharpen can approach. It can be used to restore severely blurred images, mildly out of focus images, and to reduce the soft edges that become most apparent when upsizing "for repro". Severe blurring may render faces (or number plates) unrecognizable, with Focus Fixer they will be recognisable. Mild focus blur sometimes happens to the best photographers when trying to capture "that moment", FocusFixer will restore an unusable picture to one that you can use. Upsizing an image for reproduction at a large print size often exaggerates any "softness" in an image, FocusFixer will restore the crispness of the original.

Below are examples of what can be achieved.

The first example shows FocusFixer at work on extreme focus blur.

This photo shows a severely blurred face taken in dark conditions with the camera on manual. The aperture was wide open so the depth of field was very narrow, and to compound things the image was under-exposed. Basically, the person is unrecognizable.	For this image we used Photoshop's Auto Levels to bring the image up to a point where the content can be seen.	We then followed this using FocusFixer on the version where auto levels had been applied. On an Apple PowerBook (667Mhz G4 with 512Mbytes RAM) FocusFixer took about 65 seconds. The result is a picture with a face that is clearly recognizable (assuming you knew the person), quite different from the original. FocusFixer restores the images that unsharp masking cannot, it also does it with one simple-to-use control, not three.

Example two is a typical image with slight focus blur and the FocusFixer result. (Photo © Patrick Hutton 2003)

In this typical situation the bird is mildly out of focus, easily handled with FocusFixer. This restoration took about one minute on the same G4 PowerBook. No other corrections to the image have been applied. Apart from the subject, some of the background has been restored - look near the subject's feet, but areas of the image further away have been left with their remaining amount of defocus.

Here's another example of mild focus blur corrected with FocusFixer.

The overwhelming advantage of FocusFixer is when a subject is out of focus. Unsharp masking techniques deal well with very mild blur; it estimates the blur and subtracts it from the original. FocusFixer can take a cropped and blurred subject from the background of an image that has been upsized, and then restore the focus. The applications of FocusFixer are endless. The only real constraints are that the image must be focus blurred (and not motion blurred) and that it should be of high quality. Jpeg compression is lossy, it literally throws away information, and introduces its own artifacts that make restoration difficult. FocusFixer uses every bit of information in an image, even that present in the noise to perform its restorations. Typically, images should be tiff (uncompressed), raw, or high quality Jpeg of three or four Megabytes or above.

Developed by a team of imaging scientists FocusFixer has been specifically designed to be 'easy to use' for technical and non-technical people alike. Aimed primarily at professional photographers FocusFixer will also have applications for desk-top publishing, graphic and web designers, forensic imaging, and enthusiastic amateur photographers.

FocusFixer is an innovative plug-in for Adobe's Photoshop image editing software, but like all the plug-ins to be produced by FixerLabs will work in Adobe's consumer Photoshop Elements and on both PC and Mac platforms.

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