Photo Tool Apps – Reduce camera shake – in your pictures – by Martin Duerr

While the iPhone, with the iOS behind and all those nice photo and art apps available, is a wonderful mixture to do art and art related stuff right in your hands it is not so perfect to help you edit imagery which is “shaky”.

Yes, there are software driven stabilizers available for several apps, but it still could happen that a picture you want to have “sharp” is slightly blurred due to unexpected camera movement because it’s windy for example.

Let’s discover three different methods, or better plugins, you can use to save your images. Yes, you will need Photoshop for that, but there is no written rule that you don’t do that. The iPhone and the apps came to our creative life to show us that there are no “real” borders for artistic photography, so let’s think open minded and not within borders.

First of all we will talk about what’s not possible with those plugins. You can’t recover images which have really strong motion blur because the objects itself has been moving too fast for the shutter speed, or you moved the camera within a wide range to achieve a dynamic effect. But it will work with images that have a small amount of blurred edges due to the movement of your hands while taking the photograph.

Two of the plugins work with or within Photoshop (Photoshop CS line and Photoshop CC), while one could be used also as a standalone application and the third is tied to Photoshop CC as it is a fixed part to that and not available in the older Photoshop CS lineup.

Let’s take a closer look to our image and the plugins. All application don’t simply try to raise the micro contrast in the picture to give you the “feeling” that is sharper now, they all use (different) kinds of so called “blind deconvolution”, a method to mathematically recalculate the pixel position where they should be. If you are really interested in you may read a more in depth description here:

http://www.mathworks.de/products/demos/image/ipexblind/ipexblind.html

Before I will explain the single apps you always should keep in mind that one plugin can’t solve any problems you may run into. So with our example here, one worked better then the other ones … but this may change with another subjects you have to deal with.

We could fill a lot of pages with all the sub-settings these plugins offer, but we don’t want to do that. What you will find is a short overview with enough information to check.Topaz and Piccure also are offering demo versions, so you can test those plugins. And yes, they work with Photoshop CS.