SmartDeblur v. 2.0 - Deblur Blurred Images

[Tao]

I don't know how many people have seen Adobe's Deblurring Technology that they demonstrated during one of their conferences a while ago (It was a sneak peak as a possible feature), but it generated a lot of buzz and was pretty interesting. Here's the video for those wanting to see it:

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html

That is currently unreleased. However, a person by the name of Vladimir Yuzhikov has developed a free software that does much the same thing, called SmartDeblur. His 2.0 version has an "Analyze Blur" feature which attempts to look at the image and figure out how the blur was generated, and then reverse the process to try and clear the image up. The program is still in beta, but it's quite fun to play around with.

It's not something that is easy to get the hang of right away, but it's not difficult either. Just some experimenting around to figure out the best settings for different types of images. Here's some Before/After pictures using the software:

http://smartdeblur.net/examples.html

I'm still messing around with it myself trying things out. I got pretty familiar with v. 1.27, so I was eager to try v. 2.0 when I seen it was released. It does work decent enough, though some images are hit and miss still. That's to be expected since it's in Beta though.

Anyway, just thought I'd link to this since it's a pretty interesting program and fun to mess with. Maybe some of you people into Photography can make decent use of it.

[Azley]

I'm not much of a photographer but the feature itself is pretty interesting. Adobe isn't always the first to invent something but they put a lot of work in their features so once it is out I'll give it a try. I have quite a few photos which could use a bit of touch-up to remove blurriness.

[Tao]

If you want to try the free version, I posted a link to it in my post. It's by a different person, and is supposed to operate the same way as the Adobe version. In the adobe version, they used a specific picture to show a before and after, and in the free one (SmartDeblur) the guy was able to restore it to look pretty much identical to the one Adobe did, so it does work pretty well.

It doesn't work for all photos, I've ran into a few where it doesn't really clear them up very well, and often it leaves artifacts, but if you need to get some detail back, this version works rather well. Apparently Adobe's version will be out with Photoshop CS7 whenever that gets released, so it'll be interesting to see how the two compare.