FocalBlade v1.05 plug-in Photoshop

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. It also runs natively in Photoshop CS3 and CS4 on Intel-Macs. It works with 8bit and 16bit RGB and grayscaled images. FocalBlade 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 Algorithms
FocalBlade'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.

Plenty of Tools
FocalBlade provides three automatic sharpening options for achieving perfect sharpening results with different classes of photos. With Screen and Print buttons you can make FocalBlade automatically sharpen for screen display or for printing. There is also a semiautomatic sample area feature, which lets the user focus on an important image area and thereby apply the optimal sharpness to this area. Additionally there are several Split View modes that let you compare the original and sharpened version as well as visually perform sharpening with the help of preview stripes that present you with variations of the current settings. The manual controls include independent Sharpen and Radius sliders, a Soften slider, Halo and Shadow/Highlight Fix sliders, several masking options and a glow feature. FocalBlade also offers five different sharpening methods. Opening and saving presets for reusing certain effects is also possible.

Why FocalBlade is Different
FocalBlade combines many methods for sharpening photos without ugly side-effects and offers a tremendous amount of control of the sharpening process. Unlike other tools it lets you enhance the finest details with radius values below 0.1 pixel and sharpen highly blurred details with sharpen amounts of up to 2000%. Many other tools don't offer an automatic sharpening mode, add clearly visible halos, increase noise, remove the photographic quality of photos, damage edges or need a lot of experimenting to achieve a good result. FocalBlade lets you sharpen photos without the risk of damaging them. It is flexible as well as very easy to use. Best of all, FocalBlade saves you precious time when sharpening photos and is available at an affordable price.

Windows Version 1.05 (December 2008)
» DEP Compatibility: Even if Data Execution Protection (DEP) is activated in the Windows Control Panel, FocalBlade still works.
» FocalBlade now supports the Photoshop memory management.
» Improved compatibility with some applications, e.g. color dialogs now work in GIMP and PhotoBrush and preview scrolling now works in SignLab and Image Analyzer.
» Some controls on the FocalBlade dialog were changed to bring it in line with the other PhotoWiz plugins:
» The dialog background is now silver colored instead of brown-grey.
» The Open, Save and Undo buttons were removed and are now items of the new arrow-down button menu at the top
» New Help/Prefs tab sheet at the bottom with new On Startup, On Reset and Log Settings features
» Right clicking on the Reset button displays a context menu
» The context menu that appears when right clicking the dialog background was removed
» The FocalBlade dialog was localized to German.You can switch languages with the Language option on the Prefs tab. The manual is still only available in English. » The the .ini files are now saved in the user's application data folder in case the folder of the FocalBlade plugin is not accessible. This avoids problems with restricted user permissions.
» Bug Fix: After maximizing the window (by double clicking the FocalBlade logo), exiting and running FocalBlade again, it was not possible to minimize the window (by double clicking the FocalBlade logo). It works now.
» Bug Fix: Exiting the plugin with the ESC key does not cause a messed up dialog anymore when running the plugin again.
» Bug Fix: Opening a preset does not change the state of the Auto Preview, SplitView and B/W controls anymore.
» The Manual and interactive help texts were updated. » New multilingual installation.
» The Plugin Installer now supports several new compatible applications. It is now also available in German language and correctly installs plugins into various localized versions of Photoshop CS2, CS3 and CS4 (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish).

OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Size: 2.5 MB