How do the various improvements to sharpening in Photoshop CC relate to each other? PM Zorana Gee posted a blurb I found helpful:
Shake Reduction is to remove blur caused by subtle shaking of your camera. Smart Sharpen is about sharpening the existing pixels (2D blurs) – no analysis of image or how the blur happened. They do actually work quite well together. Start with Shake Reduction as it requires the most original data in order to find the blur trace and then use Smart Sharpen.
Update: Zorana points out a detailed article on shake reduction (showing numerous before/after examples) from Andy Trice.
Funny. I just did exactly that today with a old scanned photo that needed some heavy updating 🙂
useless features for me.
deblur does not work wonders… in fact it´s pretty useless 85% of the time.
for sharpening i use nik´s sharpener who is still much better.
[Just for the record, you’re the guy who now comments on just about every post of mine, making some negative remark, right? I’m sorry to hear that Deblur isn’t working well for you, but your previous behavior is not exactly a recipe for credibility. –J.]
arstechnica.com also has a writeup today on Photoshop CC (as a whole) with a Camera Shake Reduction example too. Their conclusion on the camera shake reduction filter was that it’s “…not fast—and yes, it’s multithreaded—but the results can be very good.” I thought the result in the example was pretty impressive, myself. Sharpens and blurs are pretty processor intensive, so I would expect it to be a bit pokey regardless of multithreading.
I found the upscaling example pretty nice too. Long overdue, and nice to have it built-in for those CC users. CS6 users and those with older versions of Photoshop (going way back) can get the same functionality of either of those filters from plugins if you need it (who hasn’t at some point!). Photoshop’s plug-in architecture is great for that stuff.
As an aside John, on the UI side of thing I appreciate quite a few versions back when you added the “(best for enlargement)” and other “(best for…” tags to the Image size menu. Always handy.
After seeing some of the demos and Ars Technica’s review, I tried shake reduction on a shake-blurred photo that was in a series I just happened to be working on. The automatic blur processing gets the direction and size of the motion completely wrong on this image. I’m sure it works well on some images, but like most of these seemingly cool additions, the real utility is going to be limited compared to what’s presented in demos.
Thank you John. Perfect timing as I am looking at how to improve an image of Prague’s Lenins Wall (grafitti) from an Sony RX100 to 2AO and there is a little bit of shake.
Cheers and thanks to Zorana too.
It might be helpful for users of the shake-blur removal tool to understand that it mainly operates on detecting linear image movement. If the movement of the camera wasn’t linear, then it’s not going to work as well. If the image is also out of focus, then it might not work at all. For myself, having the possibility of removing simple linear motion blur is extremely valuable, even if this tool can’t improve images don’t suffer from that type of distortion.