Blurry vision IV

And another highlight today...

Apart from the deblurring in DNGMonochrome - which will be in the next release - as written in previous post, I also got interested in deblurring color DNGs, whilst keeping them 'RAW': not deblurring the exported end result (usually a JPG), but deblurring the DNG before it's developed. That way you won't have to go back to the deblur software each time you decide you want something changed in the DNG.

That all worked better as expected, as shown also in previous post.

I then set out to program a new piece of software, called DNGDeblur, specifically for color DNGs (although it can also deblur monochrome DNGs). However, when putting it all together, it turned out the deblurring of the color DNGs was tediously slow when they get into the size of the Leica M DNGs. Took my reasonably fast system some 8 minutes per M-photo. The Canon 5DII and 5DIII a similar story. They all have a width that goes beyond 4096 pixels, which means the width and height doubles to 8192 by 8192 values, since the FFT needs a power of two to work properly. But since that actually quadruples the total amount of values (compared to a 4096 by 4096 for say a Canon 40D DNG), the time it takes also quadruples.

Having solved the huge memory demands, I was now doubting the whole endeavour on account of speed. Waiting 8 minutes per photo... not very practical.

Then, after already cutting the 8 minutes back to 5 minutes per photo, by smartening up the software, today I finally had the right idea.

The whole procedure for a color DNG is now as fast as the one for a monochrome DNG. The M DNGs take around a minute (70 - 80 seconds), and a Canon 40D color DNG is processed in 20 seconds. This will eventually slow down again a bit, since I still need to implement some additional procedures, and on slower systems it will obviously be slower, but I hope to stay at least under 2 minutes per DNG on my own system, which is quite an improvement compared to the 8 minutes I started with.

I can't put a release date on this software yet, but I hope to have it ready within a few weeks...