Topaz InFocus

Does anyone use it and if so what do you think?
Topaz Labs InFocus

I haven't used it but I heard it talked about on the This Week in Photography podcast. Frederick has since posted a real world test of the software that you should check out.

http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/topaz...al-world-test/

Well I was completely unimpressed. Think I'll pass on that particular plug-in. Maybe I'll take another look if he posts a second video but from what I saw there the originals actually looked better.

Thanks for the link!!

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Originally Posted by mjs1973

I haven't used it but I heard it talked about on the This Week in Photography podcast. Frederick has since posted a real world test of the software that you should check out.

http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/topaz...al-world-test/

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Looks like Frederick needed to read the instructions abaout what the software actually does. He made almost no adjustment in his demo and didn't really use the right controls. The one image was pretty much a lost cause anyway. I will allow that he's good at producing a 'training video' it seems.

There's quite a bit of continuing confusion about focus, sharpness, accutance, contrasts, detail, etc. in the photography community. The Topaz products work within a range quite well. But can anything bring back focus to an object that is badly blurred?? Well, maybe a Cray 3 running one of those M.I.T. programs that unfortunately reduce the size of the photo 75% or so to get a focused image.

I'll post a sample of my results later this evening. I've got several of the Topaz plug-ins. They are not for every image and work best on certain types of noise, softness, and contrast related problems. Not so much that they are better, but an alternate algorithm and interface. Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't!

So I went ahead and downloaded this software. The 30 day trial is free so why not? I was at a party this weekend and on one of the shots I didn't pay attention to the focus points and the shot was out of focus. Not badly, you actually need to go to almost 100% to see it. Focus is about 6" behind the subject. I played with all of the settings I could find for about an hour without any success. I will continue to play with it and I also want to try it on a motion blur shot just to see if that works any better but so far I am not impressed.

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Originally Posted by dmm96452

So I went ahead and downloaded this software. The 30 day trial is free so why not? I was at a party this weekend and on one of the shots I didn't pay attention to the focus points and the shot was out of focus. Not badly, you actually need to go to almost 100% to see it. Focus is about 6" behind the subject. I played with all of the settings I could find for about an hour without any success. I will continue to play with it and I also want to try it on a motion blur shot just to see if that works any better but so far I am not impressed.

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I also installed the 30-day trial last week. I had read on this technology awhile ago (I think there's a post on the site regarding it).

Well, so far, I'm not seeing any advantage over traditional sharpening, though I haven't played with all the settings yet. It may indeed only work on certain problem images............

G

I gave it a shot, both as a sharpener and for it's advertised "de-blurring." For the latter I'd have to say it was worthless. I loaded some shots that were just a hair out of focus and all it did was add noise. The results were the same with the motion blur effect...nil. I spent a pretty significant amount of time trying to get some success, but the only conclusion I could come to was that the shots they used to advertise were good and then blurred. The sharpening I found to be a bit more useful, and found myself bouncing back and forth between it and the unsharp mask and high pass methods. There wasn't a highly significant difference, but when blown up you could see a noticeable difference in sharpening methods. It may have been a bit better. I was considering buying it while it was on sale, but held off considering the general consensus in reviews and my experience that it doesn't do what it advertises. Best bet is to get it right the first time.

A quick example from within Lightroom of InFocus results. I have also made a few test shots that I'm going to see how they tweak up compared to the Topaz Sample.

The really blurry license plate example they, Topaz, have actually can be de-blurred as advertised. However the angle of the motion is critical to getting it to work. I'm going to see if I can duplicate it.

One thing I did discover that isn't documented is that rotating the image 180degress can aid in the motion de-blur.

The following is an out of focus example: Sharpening with other tools does just about as well but maybe takes a bit more fiddling?