Tuesday, October 21, 2014

DNGDeblur

I know I promised it a while ago (deblur color DNGs) and I can assure you it's not turning into vaporware. In fact, I've been using it on some of the recent photos from Tokyo shown on this blog.

But when I was using DNGDeblur in its unfinished state, I realised I needed additional functionality, mainly the option to deblur only part of the DNG. That's now finished. You can place what I call 'deblur circles' on the photo, and then any deblurring done, stays confined within those circles (which can be moved around, changed in size and feathered, a bit like the healing or cloning circles in Lightroom). The advantage is that if you only want to deblur a face or the eyes of a face, you now can (well, I can, you not yet), without touching the rest of the photo.

One of the photos I used this method on was published a few posts back, here, the old women in the riksja.


100% crop from a 1280px jpg based on an M9 color DNG, in this state a rather unusable photo... note that this is a real life shot, not some fake blurred image (sadly, because it indicates quite a bit of user error)... Move over the image with your mouse to see the blur corrected version produced by DNGDeblur...

So I placed the circle over her face, deblurred, and then developed the resulting DNG into a 1280px JPG. The advantage being that none of the other parts of the photo got deblurred (no distortions anywhere else in the photo). It saves a lot of checking around to make sure other parts of the DNG don't start to act funny. I can now concentrate on the part I need to concentrate on to get the DNG more presentable.

Now in practice, the true 100% image after deblurring isn't great and after quite some experimentation I figured out that it seems to be ok to have some distortions in the end result as long as the resulting JPG gets downsized compared to the original size. Fifty percent seems doable.

I won't put any dates on the release of DNGDeblur, but it will be there eventually. I will most likely also incorporate these 'deblur circles' in the deblurring filter of DNGMonochrome in a next version.

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