FocalBlade lets you sharpen your photos for screen display
and print as well as produce great looking blur, soft focus
and glow effects. It is a Photoshop-compatible plugin which can be used in dozens of graphics applications including Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, Photo-Paint, Fireworks
and Photoshop Elements under Windows as well as MacOS X. It also runs natively in Photoshop CS3
and CS4 on Intel-Macs. It works with 8bit
and 16bit RGB
and grayscaled images.
OverviewFocal
Blade features a range of automatic, semiautomatic
and manual tools for sharpening photos. It is very easy to use as it offers interactive explanations for each feature, incorporates modes for various tasks (including a Novice Mode)
and detailed step-by-step instructions in the manual. Focal
Blade lets you sharpen photos quickly
and also batch process images in Cloak mode. Moreover, Focal
Blade offers numerous options for creating blur, soft focus
and glow effects
and for deblurring photos that are highly blurred.
Sophisticated AlgorithmsFocal
Blade's sophisticated algorithms let you sharpen images without ugly side-effects
and give you a lot of control of the sharpening process. Focal
Blade sharpens edges
and surfaces in an image independently thereby allowing you to keep objects (e.g. sky, walls, skin
and other even surfaces) soft while the overall photo is still sharpened. Unlike other tools Focal
Blade doesn't produce halos at high radius settings
and even provides sliders for suppressing the white
and black part of halos independently. Additionally you can weaken the sharpening in the shadow or highlight areas of the image to avoid amplifyed noise or blown-out details. Focal
Blade also lets you keep noise constant or even reduce it when sharpening a photo. With Focal
Blade you can set the pixel size of details that are sharpened. Even the smallest details can be enhanced
and made visible with radius values smaller than 0.1 pixel.