Mulligan at City of Rocks

7/30/2010. Mulligans R Us: Focus Magic is a wonderful product! I can't believe I haven't known about it for years. I've certainly needed it since... forever.

For the last couple of days, I've been using Focus Magic for my solar images and it's worked very well in that esoteric arena. Today I put it through its paces on a terrestial panorama I attempted at City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico in November 2007. You know the one — the one I frigged up because I left the lens set on manual focus after a long night of starshooting? Look, I was bleary after a week of dark sky prospecting and excited by the morning light and in a hurry to get to Albuquerque for an early afternoon flight, and I didn't notice in the viewfinder that things were not as they should be. And for once I didn't chimp the images to check what I was getting. So many mistakes! Anyway, I finally noticed that I needed to reset my lenses to autofocus when I was miles down the road, the Sun was way up in the sky, and the opportunity to redo this shot was long gone. Now it's back.

I'm more than a little late to Focus Magic. The program has been out in the world since at least 2002, and the latest testimonial on the Focus Magic website is from 2004 (!). Maybe there are better products out there these days, but this is an eye-opening utility for me. It's one I've wanted to write since 1983, the year I learned to spell "FFT" as part of an image processing seminar in computer science. Really, I know enough of the innerds of image processing code that I'm impressed with what this tool does; I've thought something like this should be in hand for over 27 years. No combination of steps and tricks I've ever found in Photoshop does what this program does in nearly as many different circumstances.

I finally found Focus Magic because of a generous and useful tutorial on stacking astronomical images by Tony Gondola. I downloaded the trial version and played with it for a couple of days. What convinced me that Focus Magic was worth registering was a photo made out a car window of some autumn woods. The snapshot (that's all it was) was out of focus and motion blurred. One pass of Focus Magic removed the defocus, and two more took care of the motion blur. What at first appeared to be a hopeless case was pretty swiftly transformed into a technically OK (although aesthetically undistinguished) image. If you start with a better image... you get a better result.

In web-sized images, it may be tough to see just how far off the raw frames for the six shot panorama are were. Here's one of the original images reduced for the web. To underline how soft it was, I've provided a pixel-by-pixel crop of part of the same image at full-resolution::

I told you these photos were a mess. Here's the same area after Focus Magic had its way with it:

Not perfect, but a vast improvement. That 780-pixel excerpt seems plenty sharp when incorporated into a ~12,000 pixel pan. Maybe a second pass or different parms or some judicious post-post-processing in Photoshop would improve it even more.

Yes: a little more sharpening and then a very tight Gaussian blur to suppress "ringing" helped, but so did the darker, richer presentation to emphasize the warm, early morning light. Read on.

The thumbnail back on the main slowblog page is a start, but it seems a little uncommitted to me (do you want the foreground in shadow or not? do you want the sky to blaze with light or softly glow? was the City of Rocks red or tan in the dawn?). I'm thinking I need to expand the sky some since it was so much a part of the experience, tweak the edges of the rocks, deepen the broad shadows, darken the sky, bring out more tones in the clouds, and suppress just a slight tendency toward "ringing" around sharp highlights. Then we'll be close to what I glimpsed in the rear view mirrors that brought me to a screeching halt just a few minutes into a long drive to Albuquerque.

Click the thumbnail for a larger view of the (nearly) finished panoarama. Next I want a print about 50 inches wide, one just as dramatic as sunrise was, as arresting as the night sky was.

For $49.95, I've been given a second chance to remember to switch autofocus back on one early morning almost three years ago. Set the wayback machine, Sherman: this is just the first do-over I thought to try. There must be many more almost-but-not-quite-right photos on these terabyte disks that could use a digital mulligan (and I'm sure there'll be more all too soon).

Focus Magic is distributed by Acclaim Software. Go get it. It runs as both a standalone product and as a plugin in Photoshop. Windows only, including Win XP and Win 7 (32 bit only). In standalone mode, the program has a somewhat dated feel and only works on JPEGs, but it offers more functions than the smooth-as-silk plugin which will operate on any file Photoshop can open.

You don't have to admit you need it. We all know we all do. Really, just go get it.

:: back to the slow blog ::