The video introducing the technology, available in the freshly released PhotoDirector 11, is promising:
However, it seems that as part of the algorithm’s effort to reduce blur, it also “blockifies” the bokeh (I flipped these images as having the “before” on the left feels more natural to me):
While the results are interesting for the added sharpness they deliver, they should not be accepted without additional masking due to the damage done to background blur.
These kinds of problems do occur with other unblurring methods as well – for instance, in deconvolution mask based approaches as found in Blurity, a bad mask will create heavy artefacts throughout the image.
In spite of the potentially useful nature of the filter for some cases, an additional “buyers beware” warning is due over the fact that resulting images have a posterised and oversharpened look to them, lacking in tonality. I would expect that this can be addressed in future updates or versions of this software, or by a competing offering.
If PhotoDirector 11 nonetheless sounds like a good idea to you, you can get it for 100 bucks or Euros. According to the published system requirements, PhotoDirector 11 requires a 64 bit operating system – either Windows 7 or macOS 10.11, with 4GB of RAM and 128MB of VRAM, and an i-Series or Phenom II processor as minimum. Internet is required for activation and downloading some file format specifications.
breakfastographer 