A friend is trying to convince me to buy a sharpening program and Photoshop plugin called Focus Magic. I tried it with a few pictures and so far seems to do a good job. What's the consensus about it?
I have it - and am not that impressed. It is after all not a normal sharpening program - but a program for trying to rescue blurred images. It works to an extent - but is not a substitute for getting it sharp to start with.
Having said that - it is a recent acquisition for me and maybe I have not got the best from it
I use it on all my photos as an additional step early in my RAW workflow in Photoshop. I use the "out of focus" setting with a radius of one. Doing that with photos that don't have any problems just gives them a tad more sharpness. It makes a subtle but definate improvement. Some folks follow a workflow that calls for a very slight sharpening early in the workflow and a final sharpening just before printing. I find using Focus Magic for the early sharpening produces better results than any traditional sharpening. I think it is because it uses a different approach and therefore you are not layering the undesired aspects of one approach (and every sharpening approach has undesired elements that show up if you increase the sharpening enough) upon each other when you do your final sharpening.
ditto what Mike says. I use it, in addition to the sharpening in LR as my basic "capture sharpening". One thing I really like is that I don't have to spend any time pixel peeping to decide if the image is sharp. Just trigger as part of an action and if it recommends anything more than 2 pixels, I seriously think about processing the image or not.
duranash wrote:
Are you applying Focus Magic on a layer, then sharpening on another layer?
I do it two different ways depending on how complex the editing I'm doing or how conservative I'm being. One way is just doing everything to the background layer. The other is to make a copy of the background layer, do Focus Magic on the background copy, make a copy of the layer I did Focus Magic on and do something to that layer, then make a copy of that layer and do something else, etc. I haven't noticed any difference in the results between the two.
Duncan Staples wrote:
Photokit Sharpener is a better tool.
I gave up on Focus Magic when they indicated they had no current or future plans to support batch processing via the FM Photoshop plugin.
Duncan
I'm getting better results with Focus Magic than with Photokit. Particularly with well focused photos, Focus Magic at 1 gives me better results than Photokit or PS' Smart Sharpen.
Focus Magic has a different effect that other sharpening programs, possibly because it adjust local contrast too? I find that it is very effective on low noise files (ext scenics etc). But this is a tool like any other which may or may not be better than your other plugs-in a protocol. Note that this program will not, yet, work on an Intel Mac (unless it's in Rosetta).
