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Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

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Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rainn Wilson is actually a really smart guy. He was playing the classic stupid guy being wowed by a genius card, it was an actor's way of complimenting him.

Anti-intellectualism aside, they still interrupted an amazing talk without adding any value. An actor's way of dominating the stage even when it's not your turn. A bit rude and unnecessary.

They added humor, and value is a subjective idea.

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#102
post #8

Let me load the specially constructed set of parameters specific to this image so that when I do the next step you get a really clear image. That was a little too hand-wavy. I'm a little dubious until I see what went into that phase.

To an extent, this is already available -- for example in the Topaz Labs InFocus Photoshop plugin. There are some params to play with that make it easier to find the blur trajectory when the blur is motion-related (although if you leave it in "figure it out for yourself" mode, it gets it right often enough). InFocus (the current version) will only do linear trajectories, though -- it can't handle curves as well as th…

Yeah, I tried the Topaz InFocus plugin after it got a bit of buzz from the TWIP podcast. It wasn't quite as magical as the demo images on the site made it seem, and I ended up not buying it (Topaz's Denoise plugin, OTOH, is quite incredible).

I suspect people will have to manage their expectations with this Adobe plugin/feature as well.

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#103

What they should do is partner with a DSLR maker and put this in the firmware of the camera itself. Imagine one button blur correction. That'd be amazing.

I don't think DSLRs have the processing power needed to unblur the images. It took several seconds to unblur a section of an image. It'd probably be faster to upload the image to a cloud processor and have it unblur it for you.

It'd probably be faster to upload the image to a cloud processor and have it unblur it for you.

It might be more efficient to just teach people how to use their cameras so that they can minimize unwanted blurring.

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#104

So, why did the whole video look really fake? It seemed to bob around in a very predictable manner. When the first sharpening took effect, it panned and zoomed exactly in time with the appearance of the second image. I'm not claiming the demo is fake, I'm just wondering why the video looks so strange.

You do realize that the video is not from Adobe, but just from visitors of the conference?

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#105

How is this different from what FocusMagic http://www.focusmagic.com/ has been offering for over a decade?

FocusMagic handles only focus blur or linear motion blur, and either way, it requires a high level of user interaction to direct the deblurring. In effect, it is "non-blind" deconvolution.

The Adobe approach, on the other hand, handles complex (non-linear) motion blur and does so in a so-called "blind" way.

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#106

If you are wondering how they might be doing it, here is one approach that I saw in a computer vision class (no idea if they are doing anything similar to this) (slides: http://cs.nyu.edu/~fergus/presentations/fergus_deblurring.pd... (~60 MB ppt) paper: http://cs.nyu.edu/~fergus/papers/deblur_fergus.pdf (~10 MB pdf) ) The basic idea is that you have an unknown original image and it is convolved with an unknown blurri…

I assume the RedLaser barcode app uses something similar from captured video frames combined with data from the accelerometer, no?

I doubt it. Blind deconvolution is hard. I think they may use something like super resolution where multiple blurred pictures can be used to recreate a less blury picture (and this is significantly easier to do than blind deconvolution).

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#107
post #100

Imagemagick can already use this "algorithm". See "fourier transform" applications such as: http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/fourier_transforms/fo... )

Deconvolution is easy. The main difficulty is estimating the blur kernel in a so-called "blind" manner. That's the advance being shown off by Adobe.

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, this is already available -- for example in the Topaz Labs InFocus Photoshop plugin. There are some params to play with that make it easier to find the blur trajectory when the blur is motion-related (although if you leave it in "figure it out for yourself" mode, it gets it right often enough). InFocus (the current version) will only do linear trajectories, though -- it can't handle curves as well as th…

Yeah, I tried the Topaz InFocus plugin after it got a bit of buzz from the TWIP podcast. It wasn't quite as magical as the demo images on the site made it seem, and I ended up not buying it (Topaz's Denoise plugin, OTOH, is quite incredible). I suspect people will have to manage their expectations with this Adobe plugin/feature as well.

I've gotten some rather amazing results with InFocus myself, but it does take a lot of tweaking of sliders and so on. It was mostly recovering irreplaceable stuff, otherwise it wouldn't have been worth the bother. (Taking better pictures is always the better option when you have it.) I do prefer the output of a mild application to unsharp masking for photos that aren't actually blurry, though. And, of course, running it after DeNoise just gets you your noise back, often sharper and more noticeable than before.

I sort of expect Adobe to do better -- they've got a lot more resources to work on the problem. Maybe I'll finally find a reason to upgrade from CS3.

Re: Photoshop 'unblur' leaves MAX audience gasping for air

#110
post #104

So, why did the whole video look really fake? It seemed to bob around in a very predictable manner. When the first sharpening took effect, it panned and zoomed exactly in time with the appearance of the second image. I'm not claiming the demo is fake, I'm just wondering why the video looks so strange.

You do realize that the video is not from Adobe, but just from visitors of the conference?

Yes. That's what makes the weird motion seem so fake. I expect random movements from a hand-held video, but this really, really had the feel of pseudo-random, repetitive motions that I've seen in CGI effect demos.
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