Focal Blade

My personal pros and cons list

Focal Blade is a plugin. A kind of sub program that can be used in any photo editor that accepts photoshop plugins. (e.g. Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Brush, Ultimate Paint, etc... and of course Photoshop and Photoshop Elements).

Its purpose is to sharpen photos, but many combinations of partially sharpening and partially bluring are possible. It is better than commonly built-in sharpening functions from any photo editor software. The algorithms hidden inside seem to be very sophisticated.

Below the screen shots, I will tell you what I found to be convenient and what I was missing.

Screen shot

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The pros:

Focal Blade tells you the zoom factor of what you see on the screen.
Remember? this is one of my fads!

Focal Blade takes a different approach than common unsharp masks. Intuitive choices will determine the rather obscure parameters for the unsharp masks.

Focal Blade offers 5 different auto modes to sharpen photos. Choose among: soft, light, medium, heavy, extreme.

Focal Blade lets you define the texture of surfaces on your photo, that means if areas of nearly the same color are textured or not, if they need to be sharpened too or if only edges need to be sharpened. Choose among: Even, light, medium, heavy or extreme texture.

Finally Focal Blade lets you define the size of details. Choose among: very fine, fine, medium, rough or very rough details.

Even easier: instead of entering the 3 values described above, you can select ONE preset. A lot of presets are available. They are even more intuitive with names like "extreme contour", "copperplate", "stone carved" etc...

Moreover, you can slightly modify the values selected by the automatic mode manually. Nevertheless this is rarely necessary.

You can save your very personal settings as a preset for future use.

Focal Blade is able to display the mask in several ways. Did you ever ask why the unsharp mask method is called unsharp mask? With this tool you can see the mask and even fiddle around to modify it, if you like.

With an additional optional setting you can produce an interesting glowing effect around the edges.

Focal Blade increases the patterns due to jpeg compression much less than other -built-in- sharpening tools.

Focal Blade allows you to sharpen your digital photos very conveniently. It is able to generate many special effects thus going farther than just a sharpening function.

This is by far not an exhaustive list of Focal Blade's features, but rather a quick summary of functions I found most useful.

The cons:

A click on the right mouse button let you see the image before sharpening. This way you can easily toggle between before and after views. But a right click lets you also scroll large images. If you only want to toggle between before and after views, but your hand is not perfectly still, the image will slightly scroll (not a problem) and the corrections will be re-applied to the new clipping (that's the problem). In cases of large photos and settings that sharpen drastically the edges and blur drastically the surfaces, you will have to wait up to 1 minute or more each time your hand is not perfectly still when you toggle between before and after view.

Radio buttons would be more convenient than combo-boxes to make your choices.

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