You know the situation – we’ve all been there. After a tiring but satisfying shoot, you get home and download all those wonderful new images to the hard drive and, almost dribbling with anticipation, you fire up your Editor-of-Choice for a ‘first look’. The thumbnails are looking good in the folder!... and invariably there’s one image in particular that you most keen to see first! ‘Come on – Come on!’ you’re saying to yourself as the behemoth program struggles into life… (I really must upgrade this thing…)

There! Finally! The image of your desires is on the screen and… Oh No! – its not sharp! At this point there follows a gamut of reactions which are privy only to the individual reader! Suffice to say that this author was given to an odd expletive or two until I found something called FocusFixer from FixerLabs here in the UK.

FocusFixer – what is it?

FocusFixer, to use the manufacturers ‘blurb’, explodes the myth that once an image has been blurred the information is lost. The vast majority of the information is still there in a blurred image - it is just not in a form that looks "good" to us. If you know how the image was blurred, this can be used with the information in the image to reverse the blur - to make it sharper. Unsharp masking cannot do this - it attempts to remove blur by blurring the already soft image and subtracting this from the soft original. This perceptual trick often looks ok but very effectively enhances noise - precisely not what you want. FocusFixer produces superior results on soft images as well as those with more obvious focus blur, it "simply" puts the "light" back where it belongs to give you a sharper image.

That said, as ever, a picture will always paint a better picture than any amount of words where facts are required. To this end, I have taken an image specifically for this article rather than point the reader in various directions to find examples. This is the full frame image:

Blue Tit (Full Frame).jpg

From this I cropped down to this version:

Blue Tit (Original).jpg

This is my ‘Oh No!!’- moment that I talked about earlier. I should explain that I had taken a series of similar images of some Greenfinches on the seed-feeder just to the right of the fat balls feeder you see in these images. I knew that when I took this image, the results would be similar in terms of the sharpness being ‘off’. The shooting conditions were (according to the EXIF data) 1/8 second @ f11 using a 70-300mm APO lens at 300mm. A Manfrotto 055B tripod, cable release and Mirror Lock Up were also used – as well as shooting through a double-glazed kitchen door window. I like a challenge!
So that said, definitely NOT the ideal shooting conditions for a fast-moving, never-still-for-a-moment, small bundle of feathers like a Blue Tit!
However, a few moments in FocusFixer and the image becomes :

Blue Tit (Selective).jpg

All the detail appears and the textures in the birds feathers come to light.

One of the clever bits about this software is its ‘LenFit’ technology which uses the EXIF data in the image file to alter the ‘de-blurring’ (my word) algorithms to take into account the characteristics of the camera and lens used to take the image. This is clearly evident when I go to use FocusFixer in my Photoshop CS ‘Filters’ tab. When the plugin window opens, the last ‘Deblur’ amount used remains on view. Even before selecting the camera used for the shot, the improvements can be seen. But, dial in your camera and model, apply the ‘Deblur’ slider and the whole image comes to life.
This is the FocusFixer plugin window used on this image:

FocusFixer Screen Grab.jpg

So – what have we got here?

Something that is infinitely superior to USM and, in my opinion, High Pass Filtering. It is very simple to use due to its uncluttered interface, is available on both PC and Mac platforms and – finally – does something I thought couldn’t be done. It improves even further the image-generating quality of a Sigma dSLR. Download the free trial and try it on one of your existing images… 0.2 or 0.3 of ‘Deblur’ just adds something a little bit more…

To close, I would point out one little ‘niggle’. When you open a new image and go to apply FocusFixer, you have to select the camera Make and Model each time. In other words, the Make and Model drop-down lists cannot be left to a specific camera model. I have raised this as an issue with FixerLabs and they are addressing it in their next release. Other than that…

I commend it to the house.

FixerLabs ‘FocusFixer’ website is here - http://www.fixerlabs.com/pages/fixer.html

From their site is a very good link to an excellent ‘How To Use’ site, albeit I have to say that I am not enamored of the 5”x4” example pictures used but the technique and application aspect is covered well… This can be found here - http://gregrob.ca/photoshop/focus/

Mike Otley

December 2004

Update.

FocusLabs have updated their ‘FixerBundle’ suite including ‘FocusFixer’.

‘FocusFixer’ is now at version 1.4 and I am pleased to report that their development team have incorporated my suggestion that the product ‘remembers’ my camera so I don’t have to select it each time I open a new image.

What happens now is that when I select ‘FocusFixer’ in PS, it automatically selects my camera whilst getting the lens data.

The way they have achieved this is very clever – and yet so simple.

Bearing in mind that their ‘LensFit’ technology (see main review) uses the EXIF data to run the ‘de-blurring’ algorithms (according to lens used), whilst bringing in the correct ‘LensFit’ algorithm, the EXIF data now identifies the camera used and shows it in the interface panel. See below.

Visually, the difference between the latest and the reviewed versions is very subtle; it’s a single line of text stating that “EXIF suggests ‘xyz’ camera” with the users ability to override this decision if required. But the impact on the workflow is very positive and very significant.

Various new camera models have been added and further ‘tweaks’ to the actual software have been incorporated; I’m not going to go down into the ‘ nitty gritty’ here.

What matters is that ‘FocusFixer’ remains a ‘must have’ product in my opinion.

FixerLabs have demonstrated that they are a ‘dynamic’ Company, prepared to be guided by their Customers and they are to be commended since we have not had to wait long for this significant update. Well done Tim and the team!

All links etc remain as published in the main review.

Mike Otley
March 2005

© Mike Otley Photography
(Editor): You should take a peek at Mike's excellent web site