Blaming the equipment when photos come out overexposed and blurry always was an iffy excuse — safer to go with the “artistic effect” in my (considerable) experience. But as excuses go, it just got a whole lot iffier. A new app named piccure+ seems able to fix nearly anything, including the horrible image quality of that kit lens, in post-processing.
We’ve had barely believable claims like these before, of course, but this time, the results seem to suggest that computing power is finally making up for lens deficiencies. Unlike most current editing suites, piccure+ doesn’t need to be provided with a profile to understand a lens’ flaws. Instead, it picks up the things that need to be fixed by analyzing the image. According to piccure — the company which makes piccure+ — this allows for a far more accurate assessment of the corrections that need to be made. In fact, they go so far as to claim that $3000-lens image quality is achievable from the output of a $300 lens (see below).
Certainly the early samples are promising, even for those of us who view them with a skeptical eye. The fading away of chromatic aberrations is no biggie, but the step up in sharpness is genuinely attention grabbing. I still feel that a top-end lens could probably provide a more “natural” sharpness, but other than pixel peepers, I doubt anyone will be able to tell the difference.
At $109, piccure+ also represents a significant saving on an investment in high-end glass, although it doesn’t come with the added benefits of a fast aperture, or a significant resale value. Nonetheless, this is an app to keep an eye on.
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