So you're a photographer. Chances are, you are also an equipment junkie. Most of us are to some extent. There's always that next big thing we want in our case. Like that camera with this awesome low-light performance, that lens with its smooth bokeh or that modifier that creates the kind of light you just cannot get with an ordinary softbox.
This is the struggle we all go through. It doesn't make you a better photographer because you use expensive gear. But it sure helps to get better results. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to make cheap lenses perform like really really expensive ones?
Apparently there is now. And it's called piccure+.
What is piccure+?
It's a software program, that analyzes every single pixel in your image and checks for optical aberrations. Optical aberrations can be explained as those areas in which your lens fails to display the reality correctly. The ideal lens (which doesn't exist yet as far as I know) has no optical aberrations at all. All other lenses are more or less flawed, which means that your images are not perfectly sharp, but somewhat blurry. This results from the lens manufacturing process of putting groups of glass together.
So, in one sentence, piccure+ makes your images sharper. At least, that's what they claim. We will put that to the test down below. (If you'd like to understand what "sharpness" actually is, please click here).
When we're shooting, we all experience optical aberrations. Probably the most common form (given a properly exposed image), is the decrease of sharpness on the edges of an image and of course a general lack of sharpness on a cheap lenses. (I'm not talking about missed focus, or motion here, that's another chapter).
piccure+ has two operating modes, one is called Lens+ (which i tested here) and the other is called Motion+ (= rescue the shot-mode, which deals with motion blur resulting from camera shake). In this review I concentrated on Lens+ because it's more relevant for my work.
The Test
I was really curious whether piccure+ could actually make up for an equipment-gap as big as $800, so I conducted a little test. I took my old Canon kit lens and compared it against my new awesome Sony Zeiss lens.
Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II, $199
Sony 55mm F1.8 Sonnar T* FE ZA, $998
I took this picture in my area with two cameras and two different lenses on a tripod, so all potential motion blur is eliminated. Both images are straight out of camera. The above is from the Canon EOS 7D (18MP) with the kit lens and below is the Sony A7R (36MP) with the Zeiss at 55mm and f/8. I figured f/8 would be a good comparison, because it should be close to the sweet spot of both lenses. Of course I had to crop the Sony image because it's full frame, and the Canon is a crop body.
Above: Canon EOS 7D with 18-55mm kit lens at f/8 /// Below: Sony Alpha 7R with the Zeiss 55mm lens at f/8
I picked a small portion of both images and magnified it to 400%. That's right, 400%. So let's compare them!
We can see that the Sony/Zeiss combo is significantly sharper, has more detail and is less washed out. But honestly, not as much as I expected. The kit lens held up quite good. Now let's take the Canon image into piccure+ and see whether we can beat the Sony/Zeiss combo.
So here you see the piccure+ interface. It looks fairly similar to other well known plugins like Nik or TopazLabs. Notice that we are in the "Lens+"-mode. I'm apologizing for the interface being in German, I forgot to download it in English ;-).
piccure+ Interface in split screen view
At first, I messed around a little bit with different settings to see how it worked. Then I moved the slider straight to the right for "Qualitative+" (because we sure do want the best quality), and also the optical slider to "Strong" on the right. I tried "Micro" as well, as I thought it would work better with smaller apertures, but "Strong" turned out to be the best. I also sharpened and checked "Denoise" in order to counteract the noise introduced by the sharpening.
And BOOM! Or more like Booo..ooo..oom, because it took a while to render ;)
On the left is the unedited Sony/Zeiss image, on the right is the Canon image processed with piccure+. Quite impressive, huh? I think the Canon image looks not only just as detailed and sharp as the Sony image, it looks even a tiny bit better and has absolutely no artifacts. And that's with only 18 MP at 400% crop! So i think it's save to say, that piccure+ closed that $800 gap.
Now just for fun, I also processed the Sony/Zeiss image with piccure+ in order to see what it is capable of. Same settings as before. And it even makes it sharper! Now you can actually see the shingles on the roof of the house below. It's pretty amazing!
How do they do it?
The approach that piccure+ uses for sharpening is a little different than the usual lens corrections. Most lens correction software is based on a specific lens profile that is used as a reference to correct the image. But in reality, every lens is a little different and there are indeed deviations in manufacturing, so you only get a somewhat "static" approach to your correction.
The difference with piccure+ is that it works with deconvolution, which means the corrections are not based on any lens reference profile, instead the software uses only the image itself as reference. Sounds complicated, and it is. But it apparently works :)
If you like, you can try and Download it for free of Buy it directly for $129.
PRO's
- It rocks! You image quality significantly improves and you can effectively get cleaner, sharper images.
- It's a customized rendering specific to each picture, not a profile-based correction.
- Price is $129, which is a good deal if you consider the money you save on equipment.
- piccure+ can be used as standalone or plugged into Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Lightroom, so it should be easy to include in your workflow.
CON's
- Since it's processing every single pixel in your image, it takes some time to render. Quite a bit of time. Like a few minutes. Of course it depends on your settings. A good way to get around the waiting time is to apply batch processing and let it render in the background.
- It has still some minor usability bugs like going back and forth on the preview or accessing the piccure+ window once you've minized it.
Verdict
Great tool, fair price, fits on every lens ;) Looking forward to future versions with less rendering time.
It would also be nice to test it with an open aperture like f/1.8. Maybe i will update this post sometime in the future. That's my review for now, I hope it helps!
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Disclaimer
All views expressed here are personal and of course piccure+ didn't pay me for this.