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First Impressions: Piccure+ for Sharpening

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design7

design7

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I have been testing out Piccure+ deconvolution based sharpening software. I am quite pleased so far. Here's what I've discovered: It produces amazing results on cheap lenses and whenever I shoot at the least sharp apertures. I shoot with old manual focusing Tokina lenses found on eBay for less than $20. The effects are in some cases night and day.

cadillac-fins-thumb.jpg


duck-blue-lake-2-thumb.jpg


car-show-2-thumb.jpg


All shot with a 40 year old Sigma Zoom 75-250mm F:4-5 wide open on Pentax K-x with image stabilization on.

All of these images were first converted from raw. The jpg images were edited with Piccure+ before additional tweaks using Viveza plugin in Photoshop. I used the noise reduction feature in Piccure+ for all three images. The duck image looks a tiny bit overcooked with noise reduction I think. Otherwise, this software is a revolution!

--
I shoot with cheap camera gear! https://stylepeterson.com
 
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design7 said:
I have been testing out Piccure+ deconvolution based sharpening software. I am quite pleased so far. Here's what I've discovered: It produces amazing results on cheap lenses and whenever I shoot at the least sharp apertures. I shoot with old manual focusing Tokina lenses found on eBay for less than $20. The effects are in some cases night and day.

cadillac-fins-thumb.jpg


duck-blue-lake-2-thumb.jpg


car-show-2-thumb.jpg


All shot with a 40 year old Sigma Zoom 75-250mm F:4-5 wide open on Pentax K-x with image stabilization on.

All of these images were first converted from raw. The jpg images were edited with Piccure+ before additional tweaks using Viveza plugin in Photoshop. I used the noise reduction feature in Piccure+ for all three images. The duck image looks a tiny bit overcooked with noise reduction I think. Otherwise, this software is a revolution!

--
I shoot with cheap camera gear! https://stylepeterson.com
Click to expand...
Yes, I have found it to work very well and with little effort. Tried Focus Magic but preferred Piccure+. I found FM produced more noticable artifacts and you had to mess around trying to judge which direction the blur was in and the preview window was small on my 2k screen.

Piccure recommend using it on a 16 bit tiff so that it has the most information to work on rather than a compressed jpg which throws away a lot of information. This has been my experience as well.

I have also used the motion blur correction to good effect.

Initially I missed the option where you can right click on a part of the pre-view which puts up a blue box and tells Piccure+ to focus (pun intended) its corrections on that area. Enables you to choose an area with defind contrast / edges rather than Piccure looking at the image in general. I have used it to scan old prints and correct motion blur as well as sharpening the image.

Processing is slow with Piccure because it does not require any lens data to work, but as it is a batch process this is no big issue just click process and walk away :-)

Meant to say if you have an MFT camera and experience shutter shock withe some camera / lens combinations (Pana GX7 + 14-140mm Mk 2) then Piccure+ is a relatively easy way to mitigate the motion blur using Piccure+'s motion blur at its lowest setting.

Ian
 
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It wasn't clear to me if Piccure+ can be used as a standalone package, or is it designed as an Adobe plugin only? Thanks... HAGD, Bob :-)
 
IanYorke said:
Processing is slow with Piccure because it does not require any lens data to work, but as it is a batch process this is no big issue just click process and walk away :-)
Click to expand...
I wish Piccure would put out benchmarks on the new multicore CPUs and on the different Nvidia 1000 cards. It would help to know where the sweet spot is in terms of performance vs cost, or if AMD or Intel is the better decision at this point.


Thank you
Russell
 
Bob 1 said:
It wasn't clear to me if Piccure+ can be used as a standalone package, or is it designed as an Adobe plugin only? Thanks... HAGD, Bob :-)
Click to expand...
Hi Bob,

It is both. If you use it as a standalone, it uses DCRAW to convert the raw image before applying sharpening. If you use the Photoshop plugin, it applies sharpening to the image after it has been converted with Photoshop's Camera Raw tool. I prefer the latter approach as it allows me to do some highlight recovery and to remove aberrations before applying Piccure+ sharpening.
 
design7 said:
Bob 1 said:
It wasn't clear to me if Piccure+ can be used as a standalone package, or is it designed as an Adobe plugin only? Thanks... HAGD, Bob :-)
Click to expand...
Hi Bob,

It is both. If you use it as a standalone, it uses DCRAW to convert the raw image before applying sharpening. If you use the Photoshop plugin, it applies sharpening to the image after it has been converted with Photoshop's Camera Raw tool. I prefer the latter approach as it allows me to do some highlight recovery and to remove aberrations before applying Piccure+ sharpening.
Click to expand...
 
Your results look really good and promising. Please give us some more info on this software. Thanks!
 
d7

Great examples of what can be done with Piccure+!

I have been a big fan of Piccure+ for quite some time now and find it very beneficial particularly when shooting wide open and if you want a specific detail or focus point optimized . . . say an eye or two in a portrait . . . the software doesn't do localized adjustments but with Ps and a layer mask this can be easily achieved.

I posted some samples a few months ago showing the various results with different levels of application . . .

Piccure+ Samples

Great program!

Best,

V G
 
Piccure+ is a great tool. It gives my aps-c DSLR images a medium format look in the way that it extracts so much detail without artifacts. Here is another shot that had alot of high ISO noise but was cleaned up very nicely and sharpened with Piccure+ (shot with a low-end Rebel XS and kit lens)

What I like about software tools like this is that you can take raw images shot nearly a decade ago and get much better quality from them by using these updated post-processing tools.

lens-sharpest-aperture-1.jpg


--
I shoot with cheap camera gear! https://stylepeterson.com
 
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design7 said:
Piccure+ is a great tool. It gives my aps-c DSLR images a medium format look in the way that it extracts so much detail without artifacts. Here is another shot that had alot of high ISO noise but was cleaned up very nicely and sharpened with Piccure+ (shot with a low-end Rebel XS and kit lens)

What I like about software tools like this is that you can take raw images shot nearly a decade ago and get much better quality from them by using these updated post-processing tools.

lens-sharpest-aperture-1.jpg


--
I shoot with cheap camera gear! https://stylepeterson.com
Click to expand...
d7

Great image . . . fab colours . . . great textures . . . interesting composition . . . almost 3D in dimension . . . fabulous!

And the great thing about Piccure+ is it generally doesn't over sharpen . . . just corrects to a higher level . . . great program . . . great sample!

Best,

v G
 
I have some sharpening tools in Photoshop but this plug-in looks really promising as well.
 
On the basis of the OP I decided to try Piccure + and played with it in Lightroom a bit and was impressed enough to buy a Pro license. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2011 Mac Mini. Both are running the latest OS X Sierra. After purchasing I started using it in earnest and discovered several serious issues.

On my MacBook Pro invoking Piccure + from Photoshop CC 2017 causes an immediate crash of CC. Invoking it from DXO Optics Pro results in a blank palette in Piccure +. Oddly it does invoke correctly from Photoshop CS 6.

On my Mac Mini it crashes both CC & CS6 when invoked. I filed several support emails and the only response was to uninstall and install the latest version. I was already running the latest version however I did uninstall and reinstall. No dice:-)

Seems to have great potential but not ready for prime time at this moment.
 
miketuthill said:
On the basis of the OP I decided to try Piccure + and played with it in Lightroom a bit and was impressed enough to buy a Pro license. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2011 Mac Mini. Both are running the latest OS X Sierra. After purchasing I started using it in earnest and discovered several serious issues.

On my MacBook Pro invoking Piccure + from Photoshop CC 2017 causes an immediate crash of CC. Invoking it from DXO Optics Pro results in a blank palette in Piccure +.
Click to expand...
Exporting direct from DxO OP 10 to Piccure+ works every time on Windows 10; that's my usual way of avoiding the rather awkward (IMO) Piccure+ user interface. :-)
miketuthill said:
Oddly it does invoke correctly from Photoshop CS 6.

On my Mac Mini it crashes both CC & CS6 when invoked. I filed several support emails and the only response was to uninstall and install the latest version. I was already running the latest version however I did uninstall and reinstall. No dice:-)

Seems to have great potential but not ready for prime time at this moment.
Click to expand...
That's not good, to say the least. :-(
 
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Piccure+ is a memory hog in Windows 10 on my 32 bit system. I always restart my computer before using it to insure that it has as much ram as possible. Seeing what it can do makes me forget about that inconvenience...
 
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