January 16, 2006 - The Plugin Site (www.thepluginsite.com) is pleased to announce the release of the MacOS X versions of FocalBlade. FocalBlade is a Photoshop-compatible plugin for sharpening photos for screen display and printing and for producing great looking blur, soft focus and glow effects on 8bit and 16bit images. FocalBlade sharpens photos without amplifying noise or artifacts and produces impressive sharpening results even on low quality images. It can be used with a wide range of graphics applications, e.g. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator, Painter, Fireworks, Canvas, Photoline and GraphicConverter.

Overview
FocalBlade features a range of automatic, semiautomatic and manual tools for sharpening photos. It is very easy to use as it offers interactive explanations for each feature, incorporates modes for various tasks (including a Novice Mode) and detailed step-by-step instructions in the manual. FocalBlade lets you sharpen photos quickly and also batch process images in Cloak mode. Moreover, FocalBlade offers numerous options for creating blur, soft focus and glow effects and for deblurring photos that are highly blurred.

Sophisticated Algorithms
FocalBlade's sophisticated algorithms sharpen images without ugly side-effects and provide a lot of control over the sharpening process. FocalBlade sharpens edges and surfaces in an image independently thereby allowing you to keep objects (e.g. sky, walls, skin and other even surfaces) soft while the overall photo is still sharpened. Unlike other tools FocalBlade doesn't produce halos at high radius settings and even provides sliders for suppressing the white and black part of halos independently. Additionally you can weaken the sharpening in the shadow or highlight areas of the image to avoid amplified noise or blown-out details. FocalBlade also lets you keep noise constant or even reduce it when sharpening a photo. With FocalBlade you can set the pixel size of details that are sharpened. Even the smallest details can be enhanced and made visible with radius values smaller than 0.1 pixel.

Plenty of Tools
FocalBlade provides three automatic sharpening options for achieving perfect sharpening results with different classes of photos. With Screen and Print buttons you can make FocalBlade automatically sharpen for screen display or for printing. There is also a semiautomatic sample area feature, which lets the user focus on an important image area and thereby apply the optimal sharpness to this area. Additionally there are several Split View modes that let you compare the original and sharpened version as well as visually perform sharpening with the help of preview stripes that present you with variations of the current settings. The manual controls include independent Sharpen and Radius sliders, a Soften slider, Halo Fix sliders, Highlights/Shadows Fix sliders, several masking options and a glow feature. FocalBlade also offers five different sharpening methods. Opening and saving presets for reusing certain effects is possible.

Why FocalBlade is Different
FocalBlade combines many methods for sharpening photos without ugly side-effects and offers a tremendous amount of control of the sharpening process. Unlike other tools it lets you enhance the finest details with radius values below 0.1 pixel and sharpen highly blurred details with sharpen amounts of up to 2000%. Many other tools don't offer an automatic sharpening mode, add clearly visible halos, increase noise, remove the photographic quality of photos, damage edges or need a lot of experimenting to achieve a good result. FocalBlade sharpens photos without the risk of damaging them. It is flexible as well as very easy to use. Best of all, FocalBlade saves you precious time when sharpening photos and is available at an affordable price.

Availability & System Requirements
FocalBlade is available for Windows and MacOS X. FocalBlade sells at $49.95 (Download) or $59.95 (CD Version including postage). There is an Academic/Student/Educational License for $29.95. It can be purchased at http://www.thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/. A demo version can be downloaded at the same URL.

Company Info
The Plugin Site is located in Nuremberg, Germany, and develops graphics, video and web software. We also created the ColorWasher, LightMachine, Plugin Galaxy, Plugin Commander, HyperTyle, Edge & Frame Galaxy, HTML Shrinker, Harry's Filters and Photo Galaxy products. We co-produced Alpha Magic with Hollywood FX and Pinnacle and also co-develop the FilterMeister plugin development environment with AFH Systems.