Make your fuzzy photos sharp with Focus Magic

It's not a miracle maker, but it probably can improve any out-of-focus image to some extent, no matter how bad the picture is.

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Focus pocus! Make your fuzzy photos sharp with Focus Magic

Quick digital snapshot of Gene Wolf, broadcasting from a studio at WTKW-FM (TK99) during the Random Access radio show, shows a common problem -- the foreground items confused the camera's autofocus system and left Gene's face out of focus. In the second photo, processing by Focus Magic puts Gene back into focus. (Photo by Al Fasoldt)

Feb. 17, 2002

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   Everybody who takes pictures gets a ringer now and then. The foreground is out of focus or the entire scene is blurry, and it's too late to go back and take another shot.
   Ordinarily, you'd think such pictures are hopeless. But they're not. Windows users who enjoy digital photography can turn blurred images into reasonably sharp ones with a new program called Focus Magic. I've been using Focus Magic for a couple of months and have come to rely on it to rescue photos I'd thought I'd never want to look at again.
   Focus Magic sells for $39, but you can try it for free by downloading it from www.focusmagic.com. You can use the free version for as long as you want, but it is limited to small images. You have to buy the full version if you want to work on larger photos.
   This software's trick of focus-pocus is amazing. It's not a miracle maker -- Focus Magic probably can't make your fuzzy shots of the Herman's Hermits revival into prize winners -- but it probably can improve any out-of-focus image to some extent, no matter how bad the picture is.
   Focus Magic does this by a clever overlay technique. All you do is select a number that represents the degree of fuzziness and the software does the rest. You can even spice up a photo that's already in focus if you're careful to keep the magic tweaking number fairly low.
   If you want to turn an image that's in focus to one that's out of focus, Focus Magic will do that, too. I was not impressed with this function, having seen enough of my own fuzzy photos over a lifetime of photography, but the effect can be interesting.
   Focus Magic has another magical function besides improving focus. It can increase the apparent resolution of any image. It does this by interpolation, creating new pixels to fill out the gaps created when it makes an image larger. I've written about interpolation before, and you'll find an explanation of how it works in a previous article (twcny.rr.com/technofile/texts/tec042901.html).
   Interpolation is one of those always-a-bridesmaid things. You'd never use interpolation if you could simply choose to increase the resolution of your images beforehand. But of course you can't always choose a higher resolution. Your camera might be like one of mine, always taking good pictures as long as you don't count the relatively poor resolution. Or you might need to enlarge a small area of a high-resolution photo. In that case, the part you're working on is inescapably of low resolution.
   So interpolation is important once you get serious about digital photography. And Focus Magic does it better than anything else I've tried.
   Focus Magic does basic interpolation at least as well as my favorite image editor, Photo Brush (www.mediachance.com). But in the way it handles advanced interpolation, Focus Magic is on a pedestal all by itself. You can control how much "smoothing" (blurring of the jaggies) takes place, and you can control the size of the reinterpolated image. Unfortunately, you must pick from preset size ratios. This could be a major problem, depending on how you use the software, so try it out for free first.
   Focus Magic has a few other functions -- noise reduction (despeckling), conversion from color to grayscale (inaccurately called "black and white" in the menu) and printing. It works best not as a general image editor but as a specialized one that you can turn to when all else seems hopeless. Try it and you'll probably agree that $39 can buy a lot of hope in such situations.