FocalBlade sharpens photos for display and print, reduces noise and produces great looking blur, soft focus and special effects. FocalBlade is ideal for sharpening and enhancing all kinds of photo, e.g. snapshots, landscapes photos, portraits as well as high ISO shots, because it effectively sharpens and reduces noise at the same time.
FocalBlade is a plugin that can be used in dozens of graphics applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro under Windows and MacOS X. It also runs natively on Intel Macs and in the 64 bit version of Photoshop CS4/CS5 for Windows. It works with RGB, grayscale, Lab and CMYK images with 8 bit and 16 bit per channel. It can be used as a smart filter in Photoshop CS4/CS5.

FocalBlade supports one, two and three pass sharpening workflows and features a wide range of automatic and manual tools. It is easy to use, offers interactive explanations for each feature and incorporates modes for various tasks and step by step instructions in the manual. FocalBlade lets you sharpen photos quickly, batch process images with the help of actions or scripts.

Plenty of Tools
FocalBlade provides automatic sharpening options for achieving perfect sharpening results with most photos. Images can be automatically sharpened for various types of displays and printing methods. You can even calibrate the automatic sharpening to match your taste. There is also a sample area feature, which focuses on an important image area and thereby ensures optimal sharpness. The split view features are ideal for comparing the original and sharpened versions as well as visually selecting the preferred sharpening. Additionally the Preview tab sheet lets you quickly compare three sharpening effects. A softproof option even simulates the look of the sharpness impression of a print.

The manual controls include truly independent sharpening sliders, a soften slider, halo and shadow/highlight sliders and several masking options. You can view the edge mask and the sharpening halos, which is very helpful for fine tuning the effect. Additionally you can apply grain to increase the impression of sharpness in low quality images. More than 80 presets are delivered with FocalBlade and you can also save your own preset files.


Why FocalBlade is Different
FocalBlade produces effective sharpening results without ugly side effects and offers a tremendous amount of control of the sharpening process. Unlike other tools it lets you enhance the finest details with radius values below 0.1 pixel and sharpens blurred details with amounts of up to 2000%. Many other tools don t offer an automatic sharpening mode, add clearly visible halos, increase noise, remove the photographic quality of photos, damage edges, only allow imprecise adjustments or need a lot of experimenting to achieve a good result. FocalBlade does not have these problems. It outputs unbelievable sharp images without artifacts. It is flexible as well as very easy to use. Best of all, FocalBlade saves you precious time when sharpening photos and is available at an affordable price.


Main Features

*Effectively sharpen your images for display and print without unwanted side effects
* Reduce noise and produce great looking blur, soft focus and glow effects
* Several modes for novices as well advanced users
* Wide range of automatic and manual tools including a split view feature
* Ultra fast rendering with hyperthreading, multiple processors and cores
* Allows batch processing of image files
* Can be applied to images with 8bit and 16bit per channel
* More than 80 presets included
* ... and much more


New in Version 2
* Renders 10 to 120 times faster than Version 1 (depending on the used settings and CPU).
* Supports one, two and three pass workflows and different output devices
* Stronger sharpening with less artifacts: Up to 2000% and 32 pixel in all modes.
* Softproof feature for simulating the sharpness of prints on screen
* Full scripting and smart filtering support
* New color noise reduction and grain features
* Protect certain colors from being sharpened
* Improved edge mask options
* Up to 3200% preview zoom, a navigator tool and many other UI improvements
* Support for Lab and CMYK image modes
* ... and much more


Compatibility
* Runs as a filter plugin in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, Photo Paint, PhotoImpact, IrfanView and many other applications
* For Windows 98, NT, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (32 bit & 64 bit)
* Old Version 1.0 available for MacOS X (You can get Mac Version 2 for the price difference when it becomes available.)