Focus Magic has forensic strength technology to recover detail that is not visible
to the naked eye. It is invaluable to publishing and advertising companies who need
the photographs in their magazines or newspapers to be sharp. It is a must for
museum and archival companies to help them get the most detail out of those old
photographs. Focus Magic is widely used by professional photographers and home users
alike to re-focus photographs of high or sentimental value.
One of our users recently put together a Power Point presentation for
his wife's 40th birthday. He gathered photo's from many different sources.
Some were slides, some were tiny black and white photos, and some were normal photographs.
When they were projected onto a large screen, they all looked a lot more blurred
than the originals. This tends to happen when images are blown up a lot larger than
the original size. He saved the day by using Focus Magic to re-focus the images and
put together a great show.
How Images get Blurred
It is useful to know how images get blurred. The most common
ways are :-
Camera Out of Focus A single pixel expands out to a circle of pixels. The blur is an equal amount in all
directions.
Motion Blur The camera or subject move while the picture is
taken. The blur is only in one direction.
The Digitizing Process for Digital Cameras Continuous
gradations of color are transformed into points on a regular sampling grid. Detail
finer than the sampling frequency get averaged into a single pixel producing a softening
effect.
Developing a Film When a film is developed a negative
is projected onto photographic paper. The equipment can again be out of focus.
This is more of an issue for old photographs which were manually developed (and
manually focused), but even modern machines add a little bit of blur.
Scanning an Image This can add quite a substantial
amount of blur especially if a cheap or old scanner is used. Lots of scanners
interpolate pixels to give a higher ppi (points per inch) than what they can actually
scan. One scanner we have produces very blurry images.
Printing the Image Inkjets and color laser printers
use dither patterns. Magazines and newspapers, make "half tone" plates
where the image is made into millions of tiny dots (see the despeckle filter). It
is often beneficial to slightly over-sharpen an image if it is to be printed on one of
these media.
Whether you scan, shoot, print or develop a photo, a little bit of
blur is added at each stage, and as a result nearly all digital photographs can be
sharpened with Focus Magic. This may come as a surprise to many people. The
real question is not "can the photo be sharpened ?" but the real question is
"how much can the photo be sharpened ?". Some photo's can only be
sharpened a tiny bit, while others can be sharpened quite significantly.
If you are an Unsharp Mask user, have a look at the comparison with Focus Magic. It'll knock your socks off.
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