The best $45 I ever spent on astronomy....

[mightymonoped]

..is for Focus Magic (www.focusmagic.com)

For those of you who have never heard of it, it's a piece of software that can be used either standalone or as a Photoshop plugin to improve the focus of images. It can address issues such as 'out of focus blur' and 'motion induced blur'. It's great as an alternative to unsharp masking and is also a great sanity check on your focus accuracy (if it suggests 0 adjustment, you generally know you've got focus spot on ) The fix motion blur can address minor star trails also!

You can try it out 6 times for free if you download it. I pretty much decided to buy it after try 3

The company are pretty cool too. When I lost my laptop and requested an activation key so that I could reinstall the product on my new laptop, they were really helpful and responsive.

Top software.

Tony

[Grant]

Thanks for the link Tony, I've just tried it on my moon images from last night, definitely improved the clarity and focus when zoomed in! http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,21566.0.html

Cheers,

Grant

[mightymonoped]

I've just looked..nice one

Tony

Thanks for the link Tony, I've just tried it on my moon images from last night, definitely improved the clarity and focus when zoomed in! http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,21566.0.html

Cheers,

Grant

[SteveL]

Ok, i`m hooked (second image is out of FocusMagic, and then had some surface blur applied to remove the noise)

[rawhead]

Ok, i`m hooked

That is impressive!

[jgs001]

That is impressive. :scratch: I'm doing something wrong or my image is just so bad...

[beamer3.6m]

Personally I prefer the 1st image as the 2nd is not natural looking.

I appreciate this was just a tester but I would stick with the first.

Good heads up on the software though.

[BG]

.

[mightymonoped]

I think the trick with Focus Magic is not to get carried away and think it will always improve the image. It doesn't!

It's another useful tool in the toolbox, if needed.

Generally speaking I might use it at a setting of between 1 & 2 (at 50-75%) for adjusting out-of focus blur, then maybe soften or despeckle the image slightly anything more than that looks tampered with IMHO.

Tony

[SteveL]

Its really only a tool to improve images that are out of focus, so good images will not be improved much (or at all). I know my M51 was out of focus, so I used that to good effect, but i`m sure that most of the more recent images will show no improvement with this.

Still, its worth the money for those nights where you screw it all up, but dont realise until you stack the subs... you have to rescue something for a night of freezing to death

[Beyond_Vision]

I quite agree Steve it worked well to enhance the detail and reduce the star size in your M51 pic. I have toiled away for an 8 hour session beforehand having made several time wasting mistakes only to find the next day that all my piccs where slightly out of focus too. This tool could rescue a disater evening.

Regards

Kevin