Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Topaz InFocus Test 1

I got Topaz InFocus downloaded last night and tried it on some images. It is very powerful, and thus you really need to know what you want to do with it for each image.

This test turned out to be quite instructive. I have an image with two girls at a party chatting and one is looking at a camera. This was shot with my D70s back about 4 or 5 years.

The main subject is the girl on the right, shown here. She was slightly out of focus though, as the focus point somehow landed on a chair back left … it was perfectly crisp.

For fun, I tried to get this girl in focus, and so selected this crop in the InFocus window (they say you should select something with crisp edges, and the camera perfectly qualifies for that role.)

And the result is very, very good. InFocus got the camera sharp, the girl’s face and eyes are sharp too. The crops below are quite a bit reduced from 100%, and yet the effect is clearly visible. And more importantly, I find that the image does not look sharpened as much as it looks in focus. Nicely done Topaz.

topaz_infocus_test_1

From here, I would probably mask out the rest of the image so the focusing occurred only on the girl and camera, then soften her skin slightly using a fog brush from PK Sharpener, and the image would be subtly, but definitely improved.

Oops … forgot to mention that Topaz are discounting the application substantially right now. The list price is $69.99usd and the current price is $29.99 … 40 bucks off is a great deal. That’s how I got on the DeNoise train, and I have never regretted that. Enter the code “SuperSharp” when you check out. Good until 3 December 2010.

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