Is your photo out-of-focus? Try SmartDeblur 2.0 beta

Vladimir Yuzhikov has released the first beta of SmartDeblur 2.0, a powerful tool for recovering data from blurred images.

Top of the new features list is an “auto-detect blur” option, which allows the program to automatically figure out whether your image is suffering from motion, Gaussian, or just plain old out-of-focus blur, and perform the appropriate corrections.

And as a result, there’s no need to try and guess this yourself (although you can manually choose a blur type, if appropriate) -- just open an image, click “Analyze Blur”, and within two or three minutes you’ll be presented with the results.

As with the previous edition, SmartDeblur 2.0 beta comes with a sample image to illustrate its capabilities -- and they really can be spectacular. It’s just astonishing how much detail can be recovered in some cases (it’s much more than basic sharpening).

We did also find many images where the first pass delivered terrible results, but there is something else you can try. If you’re trying to highlight one element in particular -- a person standing against a wall, say -- then click and drag on the image to draw a rectangle around them, and then click “Analyze Blur”. SmartDeblur then restricts its checks to the area you’ve highlighted, and in our tests this frequently made a very great difference.

There is also a down side to the new build, unfortunately. Yuzhikov says the program has been rewritten to use “freely available libraries”, and because of this “performance is several times slower than our internal version”. He hopes to improve this in future, but in the meantime, imported images will by default be resized to 1,000 pixels on their largest side (although it you’re the patient type, you can still increase the limit via SmartDeblur’s settings).

Photo Credit: Olaru Radian-Alexandru/Shutterstock