Photoshop Unblur

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I'm not sure if this is entirely the correct section for this, but it seems appt for the topic in question.

Who here has taken a shot which they think would be really good and then put it onto their computer to find that it's blurry and useless? Apparently adobe has worked their magic again and has now created a tool to 'fix' these wasted shots.


I dont know about you but that made me go 'wow'.
 
Th interesting thing here is automatically estimating the PSF (i.e. the motion path) from the image. Several groups have shows methods of de-blurring a photo by recording the camera movements (basically the gyroscopes used for VR/IS/OS wold suffice) and reversing blur function.


I always thought it was fairly trivial to extract the motion path from an image as I know several researchers doing this for other reasons.
 
I love the Adobe employee tasked with shouting "That's impossible!!" :p

Will certainly look forward to seeing how this develops and more importantly being able to try it on my own files. Never trust demonstrations.
 
I must admit there is is no way de-blur will work with all images as in some cases detail will just simply have been lost. If they can de-blur a facial close up and get individual eyelashes back I will be astounded.

I guess it is a bit like content aware fill useful in certain cases and only experience lets you know which ones. So put me in the "I want to try it first" camp.
 
Wow... imagine the maths involved in that! :D

Pretty nifty tool for when your photos are slightly blurred, or your triple images for HDR one of them is slightly out.
 
its getting scarey what photoshop will let you do now. who needs good skills when you can correct nearly everything afterwards.



why was that vid filmed on a boat though, made me a bit seasick.. :(
 
I really would like to see the hardware neccessary to do these improvements for my 18 mpix 7D raw files. Probably makes the photoshop licence look quite cheap.
 
Hands up who regrets deleting the 'just off' pictures now?

nope, because those files were deleted because they didn't meet my technical requirements, no software trick will be able to change that. There may be some every so slightly soft images that this may help, but then I treat such images by downsampling them and leaving them at a lower res for small prints/web viewing- unless I have a sharper version anyway.
 
It's difficult to know what the "parameters" he was loading were. Getting those right may be an issue. But either way, this is something I've thought must be possible for quite some time -- given enough CPU power.

I've never paid very much for software, but if this is as good as it seems to be I'm not going to object to handing over my wallet, or spending hours processing pictures. I guess it would also work for movies as well if you had enough time to waste processing each frame.

I do, however find myself wondering whether this is another step towards de-skilling photography. Much of the satisfaction comes from actually getting a shot right in the first place, especially under tricky conditions where blurring is likely to be an issue.

Mmm... nothing's ever simple, is it. :-)
 
Looks very interesting - thanks for the heads up OP!!

On a sidenote, I notice that he keeps blaming the "slow computer". If you're at a convention, especially one that deals with serious graphics processing, would you not at least equip it with some beefy machines? :-)
 
Wow.
Just wow.

So adobe sneak means it may or may not appear on the next series. Not even content awareness made me go *this* wow.
 
That's bull. You can't recover data that isn't there.

Not exactly bull, I'm guessing this is just some fancy deconvolution. It works ok for astrophotos, since you know that stars are supposed to be point sources, but it doesn't work perfectly, and technically i suppose it doesn't recover the data, it merely estimates what it should be.
I share your skepticism to be honest.
 
That's bull. You can't recover data that isn't there.

Its not fully Bull because not all the data is lost, it is just convoluted.
As lord filbuster said, imagine shooting some stars with a long exposure and you get star trails, it is somewhat trivial to remove the relative motion and return to points of stars, which is basically what this software does.
Another analogy, if you are using film an you take 1 exposure of a scene and without winding on the film you taken a second identical exposure. The data information for both photos are stored on the single frame and since one knows the exposure times were the same then simply diving the pixel values by 2 (e.g. if the frame was scanned) will get you back to the original exposure without many detrimental effects (except perhaps overexposure of highlights). Same kind of thing happens with motion blue, the image data gets recorded to the sensor but the data gets superimposed and convolved. If you know the motion trajectory function, known as the point spread function (PSF), which you can retrieve through a Fourier Transform, then you can apply the reverse function, a deconvolution.

Here is an example to show you what is possible, remember this case?
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/interpol-untwirls-a-suspected-pedophile/?hp

The warped face has massive distortion and one would think it would be impossible to retrieve the original image, interpol just played with photoshop to find the correct parameters and applied the twist in the opposite direction. You can try this for yourself.




Of course, it wont be anywhere near as good as getting it right in the first place, and it will only have a limited scope for improvement as well. A bit like IS/VR correcting only 2 to 3 stops worth of movement.
 
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