Down at AdobeMax 2011, Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs (ATL) group mem­ber, Jue Wang, stunned audi­ence with its Image Deblurring tech­nol­ogy sneak peak. DPreview:

Adobe has released videos from its AdobeMAX event, includ­ing cov­er­age of the image deblur fea­ture for remov­ing cam­era shake that has gen­er­ated so much excite­ment. The company’s video shows fea­ture in much bet­ter detail than the audience-shot ver­sion cur­rently on the web. Shown as a pro­to­type of a tech­nol­ogy that is being con­sid­ered for future ver­sions of Photoshop, the func­tion analy­ses the move­ment of the cam­era dur­ing an expo­sure and then cor­rects for it.

One of the image depicts an Adobe employee sit­ting onstage which Adobe admits was syn­thet­i­cally blurred ‘to be enter­tain­ing and rel­e­vant to the audience’:

The image of Kevin Lynch was syn­thet­i­cally blurred from a sharp image taken from the web. What do we mean by syn­thetic blur? A syn­thetic blur was cre­ated by extract­ing the cam­era shake infor­ma­tion from another real blurry image and apply­ing it to the Kevin Lynch image to cre­ate a real­is­tic sim­u­la­tion. This kind of blur is cre­ated with our research tool. Because the cam­era shake data is real, it is much more com­pli­cated than any­thing we can sim­u­late using Photoshop’s blur capa­bil­i­ties. When this new image was loaded as a JPEG into the deblur plug-in, the soft­ware has no idea it was syn­thet­i­cally generated.

The thing about syn­thet­i­cally processed exam­ple is that it rarely rep­re­sents real world sit­u­a­tion. Common blur­ri­ness doesn’t have pat­terns but organ­i­cally pro­duced defects caused by mus­cle move­ments, cam­era shake and all sorts of nat­ural ele­ments, in which alto­gether cre­ates a unique shake pat­tern beyond syn­thetic reproduction.

If you look closely on how Jue Wang did the demo, you’d notice that the deblur­ring tech­nique involves ana­lyz­ing the image and load­ing a cer­tain pre-medicated deblur­ring recipe. It is an impres­sive feat, I won’t deny that. But until I try the tech­nol­ogy on my own, with my own image with­out any inter­ven­tion from the lab, I’ll stick to my breath­ing tech­nique and increase my arm’s mus­cle strenght.