FocalBlade Cuts to the Chase

by Guy Lerner

August 28, 2003

If you’ve ever used a desktop scanner or looked closely at a digital photo straight from your camera, you’re more than likely familiar with the concept of ‘sharpening’.

You’re also probably feeling that no matter how much you sharpen your photos, they never look quite as good as you expect them too. That’s because sharpening software has typically been difficult to use or conversely too simple and underpowered to give your photos the edge you’re looking for.

Now there’s a delightfully simple – and powerful – tool that seems to cover all the sharpening ground you’ll ever need, and give you just as much (or as little) control as you want. It’s called FocalBlade.

Back to Basics
Sharpening – in its numerous guises – is what you do to a photo to restore the ‘crispness’ it loses when it passes through a scanner or a digital camera. These devices use special filters that ‘diffuse’ the light hitting their sensors to avoid jaggy or uneven edges in the final image (they’re called anti-aliasing filters, if you’re curious). In the process, they also manage to ‘soften’ the image, giving it a ‘hazy’ look on your screen.

Sharpening is intended to reduce the effects of this haze, to get the image back to its original state. It doesn’t actually restore the pixels that are lost to the anti-aliasing filter (once they’ve been discarded they can’t be restored), but instead increases the contrast between the edges of details in the image to fool the eye into seeing a sharper image. (To find out more about how this works, you can read an excellent article on the subject by Michael Reichmann called “Understanding Sharpness” here).

What's Different?
Most graphics software, from novice to professional, offers various options for sharpening your digital photos; that’s because most digital photos need at least some degree of sharpening to get them looking, well, ‘sharp’.

To complicate matters, the sharpening process is fraught with difficulties. Too little, and you won’t notice a difference. Too much and nasty artefacts degrade the image. What’s more, different parts of an image are susceptible to sharpening in different ways; large flat surfaces sharpen differently to defined edges. Over sharpen the flat surfaces, and the edges crumble.

That’s where FocalBlade shines. Unlike other tools, FocalBlade can sharpen surfaces and edges separately. This lessens the side effects of over sharpening, and puts you in control over the final look of the sharpened image. If the sharpening produces any unseemly halos (or artefacts) in your image, FocalBlade lets you ‘fix’ the setting to the point where the halos disappear. You can then save your adjustments for similar images and devices.

FocalBlade also gives you a choice of modes to work in, from novice to expert and everything in-between. If you’re just after a straightforward sharpening tool with more advanced features than your graphics software gives you, FocalBlade won’t disappoint. Similarly, if you’re looking to squeeze every bit of quality out of your final image, tweaking edges and surfaces to perfection, FocalBlade gives you the means to do so.

This layered control makes FocalBlade the most comprehensive sharpening toolset I’ve seen. It may be overkill for some, and unnecessary for others, but if you can’t sharpen your images correctly with FocalBlade, chances are you won’t be able to sharpen them with anything.

Slice and Dice
On first launching the plugin in any of its supported applications (FocalBlade works natively with Photoshop and several other plugin-ready applications), FocalBlade gives you the option of switching to Novice Mode, or keeping the default-selected Expert Mode. For the purposes of this review I stuck with Expert Mode to show you the array of functions available for tweaking.

The first thing you’ll notice is the large preview window that updates a view of your image with automatically selected sharpening settings. FocalBlade gives you the option of switching the preview off, or splitting it up in different (and very clever) ways. For example, you can choose to fill the window with the preview image, split it right, left, up and down (with the before and after slices in each section), and split it five ways vertically or horizontally to pick the preferred setting.

You can also preview by sharpening type. For example, you can set the window to show you only edge sharpening settings, or surface settings, or both. That’s just the preview window. Switch your attention to the right-hand side of the interface, and you’re ready to get your hands dirty with sharpening tweaks.

If it all looks too confusing, simply hover the pointer over any part of the interface, and an explanatory paragraph will appear in the bottom right-hand side of the screen telling you all about that feature. It’s not a comprehensive explanation (for that you can refer to the included online or PDF manual), but at least it demystifies the interface and lets you make informed choices about what it is that you’re working with.

One of the ‘hidden’ features I particularly liked is the ability to use FocalBlade to create a number of different effects other than straightforward sharpening. You can, for instance, use it to create a ‘soft focus’ look for your image, simply by selecting the ‘Soft Focus’ option from the Mode menu. This versatility is unexpected and much appreciated, because the effects created are essentially all related to the sharpening function.

If ever you’re overwhelmed by the choices, simply switch to Novice Mode and FocalBlade will do the deciding for you. In most cases this is the only mode you’ll need to get picture-perfect results on screen or for print (the amount of sharpening will vary depending on the final destination of your image).

Cuts Like a Knife
Don’t expect lightning-fast results if you’re working with large, high-resolution digital files on a slow PC. FocalBlade reportedly uses very different algorithms to calculate the amount of sharpening for different parts of an image, so it may take a little longer than you’re used to from your normal sharpening/unsharpening filters. Still, it’s no slouch, and a six-megapixel image of my son on vacation took precisely one minute to sharpen on an old Pentium III PC.

To my taste, FocalBlade overdoes its sharpening with its default settings, at least for the images I’ve thrown at it during my testing. This isn’t a train smash by any means, because it’s easy enough to push a few sliders and get the image back to where I want it, but it is disconcerting nonetheless.

If I have to fish for another fault in this otherwise faultless program, I’d say the unusual indentation of the Photo Wiz item in the drop-down filter list in Photoshop is odd (it doesn’t line up with the rest of the filters in the list). That’s nitpicking for sure, but it’s an oversight that could have been avoided.

If you work with digital images for a living, or even as a hobby, and need a more effective sharpening tool that the one you have built-in to your graphics software, look no further than FocalBlade. For $49 it’s the best value sharpening plugin available, beating others like Nik Multimedia’s Sharpener! Pro hands down in terms of features for the money.

Harald Heim has a winner with FocalBlade, and minor fixes aside, I can see it becoming entrenched in my digital kitbag for years to come and I give FocalBlade five out of five GO INSIDE Magazine review lights!

(all green)
 

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