i have run FocusFixer now on about 150 images and have a much better feel on what it can do and what it can't. contrary to the advice that comes with the software, i run it on the entire image. my reasoning is that one of the more obvious differences between lenses of different grades is their sharpness, i.e. focusing ability. if the image was "properly focused" to the best ability of the user, then any remaining softness to the limit of the digital image resolution is because of the lens. i also assume that chromatic abberration is negligible. barrel or pincushion distortion don't come into play. thus a deblur of the kind done by a deconvolution will correct most of the lens softness.
my observation is that applying FocusFixer lightly to a 4000dpi scan of a Provia 100F slide taken with my FA* 80-200 f2.8, FA* 24mm f2.0, or FA 24-90mm f3.5-4.5, the resulting image sharpness is nearly equal to my FA 50mm f2.8 Macro with no objectionable artifacts that any of the Photoshop sharpening filters produce, especially the Unsharp Mask. the price is that it takes a large amount of memory and CPU to do the job. i have run a lot of rezed up JPG files and other digital camera files through the filter too. first, don't bother even trying the filter unless you are creating the images at the least amount of JPEG compression. the filter can greatly increase the JPEG artifacts. uncompressed images work best. if your camera has noticeable color noise, as my Nikon Coolpix 5000 does, images with large areas of even tone will have the noise increased. you want to have the least amount of sharpening applied to the image, either by the camera or the RAW conversion software, before you start. the artifacts of these other sharpening algorithms will be emphasized. if you don't have enough pixels, the filter will have too many artifacts. a 2 megapixel camera is on the low side. even 3.3 megapixels has some effects that are noticeable because there aren't enough pixels, even when you rez up by 2X. 4 or 5 megapixels is probably about the lower limit for repeatable good results. when using FocusFixer the way i do, the Deblur slider setting for best results depends on image resolution and you can't use a single setting for all your images. what works well for a 4000dpi scan of a slide will be too much for 2 megapixel images. you need to move the slider in small increments starting from the left and to the right until you have seen two losses of contrast and the image is getting sharp again. watch the sharp edges to make sure there aren't any shadow lines appearing next to them. if there are, you have gone too far. if you go way too far to the right, you will start distorting features in the image. although i have read the documentation on the Threshhold slider, i have yet been able to see any effect in the preview window or the image itself. i probably don't recognize the effect yet. it looks like this filter will be one of the standard ones i apply to many of my images to give them higher real resolution than i saw on my slides. i'm not sure i will go along with their advice to do the deblur operation before doing anything else or to do the color adjustments first. the filter works in 16-bit/channel mode so i think that the color adjustments shouldn't produce enough artifacts to affect the filter. Herb....
