Focus Magic - Sharpen Your Blurry Images and Photos (2024)

* Photoshop Shake Reduction Filter – We used the manual settings (with the Blur Direction tool on the left in the filter) because the auto-detected settings were very hit and miss. The auto-detected values ironically do not have a distance and a direction and the blur correction seems to be applied in “all directions”.

** Other Products – There are lots of other products with a sharpen filter. All the other ones that we are aware of use the “Unsharp Mask” method similar to the Photoshop Unsharp Mask filter shown above. The way they work is quite simple. They blur the photo a bit more, see how each pixel has changed, and then change the pixels in the opposite direction. For a small amount of blur this works OK, but for more significant blur, it just doesn’t work.

A few years back I was shooting skateboarders at a local park. I had the idea of shooting from below the skater so I could better see his face. So I lay on my back in the bottom of the basin and had the skater come flying over me. The trouble with this was that I completely forgot about how the autofocus would work. The skater was only above me for a fraction of a second and the camera was set up to ignore such brief changes in focus, so even with an ultra-wide angle lens the shot ended up being focused on the distant sky rather than the guy. A quick chimp at the rear screen afterwards didn’t show the focus problem so I thought I was cool and moved on to the next shot.

Back at home I saw the problem and had to leave the shot as unsavable. About 6 months later I came across Focus Magic and remembered this blurry image as the perfect test. For me the improvement is remarkable. So much better than any of the usual sharpening techniques and tools, and so I bought it and use it every now and then when I stuff up a shot that can’t be taken again.

The original raw file was converted in Lightroom. The sharper version was put into Photoshop CC and first thing I did was run Focus Magic as a layer. The correction factor was 19, so it’s at the upper end of the corrections that can be done. The other settings were left at default. I then cleaned up a few fringes using the clone tool and ran it through Nik Color Efex to correct the colour balance and give the contrast some help.

Then I downsized to 2000 pixels tall and ran Nik Output Sharpener at a fairly high setting, with the Focus slider pulled up to 30%. These are more aggressive settings than I normally use but actually made much less impact on the final image than Focus Magic. Final step was to downsize to 1000px tall using the bicubic sharpener setting and save as jpeg.

The result is greatly improved. I can’t say it’s perfect but it’s gone from an image that never saw the light of day to one that I keep on my Flickr photostream. Thanks for Focus Magic and I hope there are further improvements to come!