Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Comments
Focus Magic takes a sensible approach to image sharpening by finding the root cause
of the blur. It really does work, as Keith Cooper of Northlight Images (www.northlightimages.co.uk)
attests. Although the processing tends to be slow, it succeeds in reducing
blur to the extent that images can be printed significantly larger than would otherwise
be possible. The best policy is to avoid the error in the first place, but Focus Magic is
an excellent emergency repair tool.
Version: Focus Magic 3.0 (2008)
Plugs into: Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel PhotoPaint, Ulead PhotoImpact, and others
OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista; Mac OS X
RAM: 512MB
Supported file formats: Stand-alone version JPEG; plug-in version as host
Price level: Approx. $45
Address: Acclaim Software Ltd., P.O. Box 51-722, Pakuranga, Auckland, New Zealand
www.focusmagic.com
Intellisharpen
Vendor: Fred Miranda
Purpose: Provides halo-less sharpening, edge sharpening, luminance sharpening, and mode sharpening
Description
Intellisharpen is sharpening software that offers a full set of sharpening tools, brought
together within an intuitive interface. It promises halo-less sharpening, edge sharpening,
luminance sharpening, and mode sharpening, among others, with options to
sharpen fine detail. The vendor has done a lot of the hard work for you by providing
100 Intellisharpen intensity levels and 100 sharpen fine detail levels. You can select
between high and low ISO settings, control halo size, and remove chroma noise.
Comments
Intellisharpen I was a first-rate sharpener, and Intellisharpen II (revised versions of which
revert to Arabic numerals such as 2.5) is even better. Its output is demonstrably good,
as you can see from the vendor’s site and from before/after images submitted to forums.
It has all the main features you would expect from a quality tool, plus some extras like
the Intensity Tweak slider that lets you make last-minute adjustments to a selected intensity
level. It is an excellent value.
Version: Intellisharpen 2.5 (2008)
Plugs into: Photoshop 6 and up; Photoshop Elements 1, 2, and 3
OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista; Mac OS X