FocalBlade

FocalBlade comes as a standalone program and as a plug-in for various graphic editors, like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact and IrfanView. The tool provides an efficient and simple way to sharpen stored images or items from connected cameras. The main purpose is to reduce noise and generate good looking blur, soft focus and special effects.

It's optimal for sharpening and enhancing different types of pictures, such as snapshots, landscapes and portraits, and reduces noise at the same time. The supported file types are JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PSD, DNG and camera raw formats. The interface is accessible and intuitive divided into three preview tabs and the properties panel, which contains the manual, auto, fix, mask and effects panes, along with their individual attributes, help, histogram and info tabs.

If you're using the app for the first time, its approachable layout aids you to easily get familiarized with its menu, as hovering the pointer over an element displays a detailed explanation in the help panel. Plus, if you don't want anything complicated, the easy mode offers essential features. The provided algorithms enhance and reveals all the small details with different radius values and sharpens up to 2000% without damaging the image quality. Edges and surfaces can be sharpened individually without ruining the softness of particular areas such as sky, skin, walls and others.

The Adaptive method sharpens each pixel with a distinct radius, depending on the details level. FocalBlade provides sliders for lowering the white and black elements independently. It lets you protect specific shadows, highlights and colors. The split view and preview options, come in handy when you want to compare the original and sharpened version, as well as choose the optimal sharp strength. You can apply grain effect to increase the impression of sharpness in low-quality images.

Taking everything into consideration, FocalBlade is a useful and fun tool designed to offer a complete method to adjust the sharp strength level without destroying the overall picture quality and to create impressive pieces of art out of your old photos.