Every once in awhile you have
a picture that looks pretty good - but the focus is a bit soft.
IOW, it's not quite as clear as you'd want it to be. Why? A bit
of a handshake while snapping the picture. You should have been using
a tripod. Maybe you're using a lens on an SLR that is known to be
'soft' if it's at its full telephoto abilities. All of those things
plague me. But I'm lazy and don't like toting around a tripod.
In the sample picture:
It's a little dark, a little bland in color and the otter isn't as clear
as I'd like him to be.
The first thing I do is adjust
the lightness by fixing it in Photoshop (Part 3).
Once I've done that, I save it at its compression (12 in Photoshop)
and then open it in PaintShop Pro.
I'm going to go ahead and crop
it at 4x6 - horizontal. (Part 2)
Now I know my little guy has
a bit more color than what's in the picture. He's a bit more reddish
and the green is lacking some punch..So I'm going to adjust the color
as I did in Part 4 by going to
- Adjust
- Automatic Color Enhancement
Now he's looking pretty good.
But he's just not as sharp as I want him.
There's this wonderful little
plugin that you can add to PaintShop or Photoshop (or both), called Focus
Magic. It's also a stand alone program. It's a little expensive
(45) but it's worth it for what it does. (there's
a free download to try it out) Now there's ways to "fix" the sharpening
of any image, by using what's already built into PaintShop or Photoshop.
However, they also have their drawbacks.
Built-In sharpeners
- go to "adjust"
- choose "sharpen"
- Choose "unsharp mask"
A little box will pop up that's
similar to all the other ones. Go ahead and play with the settings for "radius"
"Strenght" and "clippings" and see what each does. Typically the lower
the number the less you're doing to the image. Problem is, the higher
the number - the more you do to the image. To the point that you can damage
the image. This is called JPEG Artifacts. It comes from overworking
an image. You can read more about it here.
If you ever see fine little jigglies and things that just don't look right,
in your image, after working it --- that's a jpg artifact.
That's what the built-in sharpeners
can do to an image. It's hard to get the image sharp w/out getting
the artifacts. And the artifacts can kill your image.
Focus Magic
This plug-in makes it a bit easier to deal with w/out worrying so much
about those artifacts. If you have it installed, simply follow the directions:
- go to "effects"
- choose "plugins"
- find "focus magic"
- choose "fix out of focus
blur"
As you see, you have a red square over a section of the image, on the left.
On the right, it shows you a before and after thumbnail. You can go
ahead and move the red square anywhere you want by simply clicking and dragging.
- I typically ignore "image
source". I've found that it makes no difference if it comes from
a digital camera, software, etc.
- The "detect" button will
detect how much correction an image needs - based upon where the red
square is located. I don't normally like the results of letting
it do what it wants. I start out with "1" and then work from there.
- Amount that will be applied
to the image -- For example, if you think 1 is a bit too strong, change
that percentage to 25 or 50%. It lessens the "1". Sometimes
I think a something isn't a 1, but a "2" is too strong. So I put
a "1" in the detect section and a "150%" in the amount section to see
what it does.
- Hit "ok" to apply once you
like any changes.
My end result, after monkeying
with all of that is:
