FocalBlade's Maximum radius

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Drog

FocalBlade's Maximum radius

Post by Drog »

One Unsharp Mask technique I love is done using a high radius (40-60 or so) with a low amount (15-30). This technique removes haze and, according to Michael Reichmann of luminous-landscape.com, improves dynamic range (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutor ... ment.shtml). In any case, clarity is definitely improved with this technique. Recently, I replaced my previous photo editors with Corel Photopaint, and although I love Corel Photopaint and have never been so happy with an image editor, its Unsharp Mask filter has a maximum radius of 20 (the filter may work differently than others, however, it doesn't do quite as good of a job at improving clarity/haze removal).

What's the maximum sharpening radius in FocalBlade? Can this plug-in be used effectively to improve clarity and remove haze?

Thanks!

HaraldHeim
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Post by HaraldHeim »

Sorry, but the suggested method only minimally enhances contrast (and that only in the dark areas), but tremendously increases saturation and also increases sharpness. So it does three different type of corrections at the same time without giving you any real control over the intensity of all three of them.

I would call this a quick and dirty photo correction method that may be fun for beginners, but if you want to do serious photo corrections you should better avoid this method. You can achieve better and more precise results if you edit contrast, saturation and sharpness independently.

FocalBlade offers a max. radius of 16.0. For sharpening photos you never need a larger radius than 4.0, even for very large photos. I only added such a large max. radius, because it is sometimes useful for blur effects.

I didn't develep FocalBlade for correcting the clarity or haze (which are just other words for contrast) of photos. My ColorWasher plugin already does that.

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