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.
OverviewFocalBlade 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. FocalBlade lets you sharpen photos quickly and also batch process images in Cloak mode. Moreover, FocalBlade offers numerous options for creating blur, soft focus and glow effects and for deblurring photos that are highly blurred.
Sophisticated AlgorithmsFocalBlade's sophisticated algorithms let you sharpen images without ugly side-effects and give you a lot of control of the sharpening process. FocalBlade 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 FocalBlade 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. FocalBlade also lets you keep noise constant or even reduce it when sharpening a photo. With FocalBlade 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.