Yet another slider?

Another break in the deblurring business. It will lead to one more slider in the filter, but this might be the 'fix almost all' slider I've been searching for.

The sad part is that I ventured on this solution much earlier, but gave up on it, since the results were not great. The idea was to put a gaussian function over the kernel and thus soften the kernel image towards the edges. But I couldn't get to the right gaussian and make it flexible and fast enough to scale with the radius of the kernel. Besides, the results didn't seem very good anyway on kernels with a small radius - most likely the gaussian dropped off too steep or not steep enough - so I gave up on the idea.

Yesterday I came back to it, still thinking there should be a noticeable difference when lowering the kernel values from the center outwards, so I decided to try a linear approach. Simply lower the values the further they are away from the center, without the curve of a gaussian. And that indeed gave the results I was looking for.

Much of the grosser distortions dropped away, without the need to slide a lot anymore with any of the other sliders. The motion deblurring with the line became a lot more effective, and so did the focus deblurring. And in the free grid, some combinations that before would lead to very big distortions suddenly became usable.

Let me show you an example... this kernel leads to the distortions shown in the photo under it...





Now with the new slider activated and without any changes to the other sliders...



And although this is not an endresult (a bit of sliding with the other sliders is still necessary), it's for this kernel a result I wasn't able to achieve with only the other sliders.

In combination with the deblur circles (actually they are ellipses now) I think I have a much more workable piece of software.

I know... me droning on about it without you being able to try it is frustrating, but it will be released soon. The deblur circles are finished (last step was to be able to turn them into ellipses) and this new slider will most likely be finished this week. Then there's some cleaning up and running some tests to see if I have all the details right, but that shouldn't take up too much time.