Magic Sharpener 2.0

Magic Sharpener 2.0 offers you a great tool for your photos. This is an amazing image sharpening Photoshop-compatible plug-in for Windows designed by ImageSkill Software.
It allows a user to get a dramatically improved look of images by perceived sharpness enhancement without increasing color halos and noise.

This plug-in increases the contrast along edges and gets more sharpness and contrast to fine details, making them more visible. These latter features can be managed independently, making sharpness enhancement to be content-sensitive in some sense. Since sharpness increasing is a very creative process in which one tries to satisfy demands that in general contradict each other, the separate processing of edges and fine details gives everyone an unbelievably easy way to realize his own flight of fancy. The plug-in is additionally supplied with a new brushed selective sharpening function. These are the main features that differ this plug-in from competitive ones. Everyone dealing with sharpening technique knows how annoying noise exaggeration may be when noise is mixed with image details.

Magic Sharpener has a good ability for preventing noise amplification in the process of sharpness increasing; all you need is to switch on the relevant check box, choose an image area where noise is obvious, and adjust the noise level. Magic Sharpener is indispensable in the case of digital cameras whose lens in itself yield a slightly unsharp shot. The plug-in has a stylish user-friendly intuitive multi-lingual interface. A user can choose the language during the plug-in installation but can easily to change it while working with the plug-in. It has simple install and de-install procedures and can work with commercial software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel (Jasc) Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Digital Image Suite, as well as free software like IrfanView and XnView.

Installing and uninstalling

Download and run the setup file. The installer finds all the suitable graphic hosts on your computer. Choose one of them from the list and then the installer automatically installs the plug-in. If you want to install the plug-in in another folder, select item "Other path" and set the path. In this case you must set the "Plug-ins path" of your graphic host in the setup folder.

The installer automatically finds the following graphic host applications:

• Adobe Photoshop 7, CS, CS2, CS3, CS4
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 2, 3, 4, 5
• Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7, 8, 9
• Corel Paint Shop Pro (Photo) X, X1, X2
• Corel Photo Paint 11,12
• Xara Xtreme
• Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
• Macromedia Fireworks 2004, 8
• Ulead PhotoImpact 8,9,10,11,12

Plug-in can also work under the following graphics host

• XnView
• IrfanView
• Corel Painter

This is not an exhaustive list. The plug-in may be compatible with other graphic hosts as well.

 Major Features:

1. Zoom tool: Use this tool for zooming. Click on an image to zoom in and right click on an image to zoom out.
2. Pan tool: Click and drag to pan the image if it is larger than the window.
3. Brush for local sharpness correction: Use the brush to adjust sharpness locally. Click the brush icon in the toolbar, choose the option Decrease or Increase from the Sharpness mode and set the brush properties - see below. Move the brush stroke to the place where you want to decrease or increase the sharpness locally and click the left mouse button. Assuming you start with an image which you have just sharpened using the plug-in, you can use the brush to locally reduce the sharpness but by no more than the plug-in sharpened it - see left image below. That means you are back to the original, untouched image. In contrast to this, the brush may be used to increase the sharpness but by no more than is possible with the plug-in - see right image below
4. Radius: Allows changing the size of image fuzziness in pixels
5. Edge sharpness: Increases edge steepness
6. Line contrast: Allows increasing the amplitude and steepness of fine details in an image.
7. Prevent noise amplification: Check this flag to prevent noise increasing in selected noisy image sample.
8. Noise level: Decreases the extent of noise amplification
9. Remove JPEG Artefacts
10. Brush properties

• Sharpness mode - Select the Decrease (Increase) radio button to make an appropriate local sharpness correction
• Size - Sets the diameter of the brush in pixels
• Hardness - Sets the brush edge sharpness
• Opacity - Sets the transparency level for the brush
• Reset marked area - Click this button to cancel the result of the local sharpness correction for a chosen Sharpness mode

 Using Magic Sharpener

This plug-in can process RGB or Grayscale image with 8 or 16 bits/channel only with or without transparency. If you have an image in another mode (CMYK, LAB etc.) - Magic Sharpener will be disabled in "Effect" menu.

• Run your graphic host and open an image.
• Run the Magic Sharpener plug-in. (For example, in the Adobe Photoshop click "Filter->Image Skill->Magic Sharpener ").
• Adjust plug-in parameters to achieve a desirable result.
• Press OK button and return to host.

Enhancements:

• The milti-language interface was implemented (English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Japanese) .
• The plug-in is supplied with a new brushed selective sharpening function.
  

Requirements: Requires Photoshop-compatible graphic host program

 WareSeeker Editor