PICCURE Rock!!

A day ago I test and wrote about PICCURE, a software that claimed to get rid of blurriness in your picture caused by camera shake. During my test I discovered a few discrepancies, for instance; Photoshop's Smart Sharpen made some of my "blurred" pictures sharper than PICCURE!

After I published my story, I shot off an email to the maker of PICCURE; looking for an answer.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a reply in less than an hour!!

" Hi CY,

Thanks for trying us out!

You are right: PICCURE may be equally good like other programs for small blurs (that may not be even caused by camera shake). 

However, we beat them on anything that is a little bit bigger than a micro blur - plus: PICCURE really gives an "authentic sharpness" for small blurs.
 
I did attach a few images - feel free to try them out and post them.

Thanks a lot for reporting about us!
 
Cheers

Hmmm... that sounds like a challenge and I never run away from one ;)


The 4 pictures they send me were the same one they posted on their web site, the one I received are hi-res JPEG though.

I will put all four through PICCURE and PS Smart Sharpen to see if what they claimed in their reply is true!

Picture 1, this is the original; when I checked the meta data (Get Info) I found out this shot was taken with a Canon EOS 1000D, 18-200 f6.2 lens @ ISO 200, f6.3 and 1/500 sec. I seriously doubt that at 1/500, there will be camera shake!

Zooming in confirmed the shot is indeed "a bit blur", I am sure that image softness was caused by the cheap zoom lens; NOT camera shake.

As expected PICCURE  got rid of the image softness and made the picture much sharper.

Photoshop Smart Sharpen made the photo even sharper, is it sharper than PICCURE? Take a look below...

Look to me the Smart Sharpen in Photoshop did a better job than PICCURE :)

Picture 2 was shot with a Canon EOS Kiss F, ISO 800; f5.6 and 1/25 sec. The rather slow 1/25 might contributed some camera shake, however; if you look carefully, the blurriness in the foreground could due to the wrong focussing. Notice the woman on the right is sharp? Unknowing to the photographer, the auto focus went to the background.

A 100% cut from the original picture.

PICCURE managed to remove the camera shake and made the "cut" sharp!

Photoshop Smart Sharpen was not able to remove the shake induced blur.

There is only so much you can do to an out of focus image (top), however; PICCURE did a really good job of making it much sharper (middle) than Photoshop Smart Sharpen (bottom)!!

I think there was indeed some camera shake in the picture above and PICCURE managed to fix it effectively. Smart Sharpen, of course; was not coded to remove blurs caused by camera shake.

 Picture 3 of the Taj Mahal look to me, another out of focus picture! Notice the guy with green stripes shirt, focussing has gone there ;) There were no embedded data in this picture, but since I myself actually has shot sunrise at the Taj; I know the dim ambient light can demand a slow, camera shake inducing speed. Look at the enlarged "cut" below, notice the "double image"? A classical case of camera shake!

Zooming into the picture revealed camera shake induced "double image".

PICCURE managed to remove the artifacts and regained the image sharpness!

Again Smart Sharpen failed miserably to remove the shakes.

I was very impressed what PICCURE can do to the "shakes infested" picture! Are you?

The last picture from PICCURE contained CAMERA SHAKES GALORE! Can any software REALLY fix that?  We will see...

Blur enough for you? Again, notice the "out of registration", double image; around the subjects. Mother of all camera shakes ;)

PICCURE to the rescue, not perfect but look at the regain of sharpness! Magic!!

Poor Smart Sharpen, you are just not cut out for the job!

Famous Last Words...

PICCURE  ROCKS!!

From my test I can see PICCURE did an incredible job of removing camera shake induced artifacts and blurriness!

I think those guys at the Intelligent Imaging Solutions might give Photoshop a run for their money in this area.

Like any beta release, there are a few issues to iron out; like it crashed sometimes when the image is a TIFF and more than 70MB.

Instead of just being a PLUG-IN, I personally feel that PICCURE also should include a stand alone application; not everyone have Photoshop!

It has been an interesting test, I look forward to test the official release!

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PICCURE Beat Photoshop In Deblurring Camera Shake!