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FocusMagicAs the advert says, this does exactly what it says it does on the tin - puts your out-of-focus shots, or those with camera motion blur, back in focus. Actually it can not correct everything, but how often does one take a bad shot! I use FocusMagic all the time as it increases the "actual sharpness" unlike the edge-contrast effect of the "perceived sharpness" (you get from Photoshop's Unsharp Mask) and even a 1 pixel re-focus can make a lot of difference - so I use it for nearly all my macro work and occasionally when my depth of field was not enough (by making a feather selection before running FM). Here are two different views of what FM can do for you... 1)
2) Now lets look at the difference with/without FocusMagic and then sharpening an image - I have used the same USM values (the SuperSharp one from my Action set in Luminosity blend) to exaggerate the effect (normally one would reduce the sharpening amount). The following magnified crops are of a macro shot of a plant leaf.
Remember that Photoshop sharpening is like eye makeup, it enhances the feature and makes it stand out. This is totally different from getting the image in sharp-focus. Using both will, normally, produce superior results - for me this is a no-brainer, I want the best - so I always run FocusMagic, sometimes selectively, before doing anything else. Oh but if you have a noisy image, then clean it up first or FM will exaggerate the noise. |