FocalBlade sharpens photos for display and print, reduces noise and produces great looking blur, soft focus and special effects. FocalBlade is ideal for sharpening and enhancing all kinds of photo, e.g. snapshots, landscapes photos, portraits as well as high-ISO shots, because it effectively sharpens and reduces noise at the same time.
FocalBlade supports one, two and three pass sharpening workflows and features a wide range of automatic and manual tools. It is easy to use, offers interactive explanations for each feature and incorporates modes for various tasks and step-by-step instructions in the manual. FocalBlade lets you sharpen photos quickly, batch process images with the help of actions or scripts.
FocalBlade is a Photoshop-compatible plugin which can be used in dozens of graphics applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro under Windows and MacOS X. It also runs natively in Photoshop CS3/CS4 on Intel-Macs and in the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4/CS5 under 64-bit Windows. It works with RGB, grayscale, Lab and CMYK images of 8-bit as well as 16-bit per channel. It can be used as a smart filter in Photoshop CS4/CS5.
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. The Adaptive Radius method even sharpens each image pixel with a different radius depending on its details level.
Unlike other tools FocalBlade doesn't produce visible halos at high radius settings and even provides sliders for suppressing white and black halos independently. Additionally you can weaken the sharpening in shadows, highlights and protect certain colors to avoid amplified noise or blown-out details. FocalBlade even reduces noise while sharpening the image. The smallest details can be enhanced and made visible with radius values smaller than 0.1 pixel.
FocalBlade provides automatic sharpening options for achieving perfect sharpening results with different kinds of photos. Images can be automatically sharpened for various types of displays and printing methods. You can even calibrate the automatic sharpening to match your taste. There is also a sample area feature, which focuses on an important image area and thereby ensures optimal sharpness. The split view features are ideal for comparing the original and sharpened versions as well as visually selecting the preferred sharpening. Additionally the Preview tab sheet lets you quickly compare three sharpening effects. A softproof option even simulates the look of the sharpness impression of a print.
The manual controls include truly independent sharpening sliders, a soften slider, halo and shadow/highlight sliders and several masking options. You can view the edge mask and the sharpening halos, which is very helpful for fine-tuning them. Additionally you can apply grain to increase the impression of sharpness in low-quality images. 80 presets are delivered with FocalBlade and you can also save your own preset files.
FocalBlade produces effective sharpening results 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 sharpens blurred details with 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, only allow imprecise adjustments or need a lot of experimenting to achieve a good result. FocalBlade does not have these problems. It outputs unbelievable sharp images without artifacts. 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.
New in Version 2
FocalBlade 2 incorporates dozens of new features and improvements. First of all, it renders 10 to120 times faster than Version 1 depending on the used settings and CPU. It supports one, two and three pass sharpening workflows and different output devices. FocalBlade 2 is now full scripting aware and supports smart filtering in Photoshop CS4/CS5.
FocalBlade 2 achieves better sharpening effects with less artifacts through improved edge masking and halo reduction. It also allows sharpening with up to 2000% and 32 pixels, which was limited to 1000% and 16 pixels previously. To further reduce sharpening problems you can also select upt to three colors that will be protected from being sharpened. The new Softproof feature, which simulates the sharpness of prints on screen, helps users achieve satisfying sharpening results without test prints.
FocalBlade 2 now also sharpens Lab and CMYK images directly. You can also reduce color noise, add grain, zoom the preview up to 3200% and benefit from several UI enhancements, including a new Navigator tool for quickly displaying an image area in the preview.