Blurry photos, be gone!

Blurity has a new look, faster interaction, and — most importantly — a much-improved deblurring engine.

Is it perfect? No.  Not by a long shot.  But I do believe that Blurity now meets the inclusion criteria for the category of “somewhat useful.”

That said, there are some caveats.  A few ways to be disappointed:

• Submitting a huge image and expecting processing to be done nearly instantly.  It takes a while, as in five or more minutes, to process most images.
• Trying to use it from a non-Webkit smartphone.  If your phone runs Android, iPhone OS 3.0+, or WebOS (e.g., the Palm Pre), your experience should be quite decent.
• Expecting miracles.  If the blur in the image is extreme, if the noise in the image is crazy, if the image compression is incredibly aggressive, if the image is really small, if the photo is horribly overexposed… well, then, Blurity probably won’t work too well.  It works best on moderately blurry, not-too-noisy, not-too-compressed, reasonably large, reasonably well-exposed photographs.
• Selecting a bad focus point.  The focus point should be the part of the image that you most wish would have been sharp.  The deblurring is applied to the entire image, but the focus point is used to model the blur, so it’s important that you choose something reasonable.

I sincerely appreciate the feedback that you all sent my way after the initial release.  Many of the changes in the new version were driven by those comments, and many of the future changes will be linked to comments that I have yet to act upon.  Comments on this newer version are appreciated and needed.

With the site now at a point where it isn’t a complete embarrassment, I’m going to begin a marketing push that extends beyond my blogs.  Expect to see and hear more in the coming days as I actively promote it for the first time.

Give Blurity a try.  Make your blurry photos sharp.  Let me know what you think.

(Cross-posted on Keacher.com)

Blurity! is here.  Image processing technology once limited to academics and scientists has been brought to the masses.

Have a blurry photo?  Upload it, select the spot that should have been clear, and let the service do the rest.

Ok, enough of the marketing talk.

Here’s the deal: I’m launching Blurity! today, very quietly.  The site is super-ugly, the image processing is slow, and the underlying processing algorithms could use a serious boost in quality.  Lots of bugs too, I’m sure.  In short, it’s a very early prototype.

Why release now instead of holding out for a more refined product?  Simple: release early, release often.  I’m pretty sure that most of what I have in place will end up changing, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense putting the polish on something that is in such severe flux.  In addition, people seem more amenable to providing useful feedback on something that doesn’t appear to be finished.

So there it is.  Give it a try.  I’d love to hear what’s good and what’s bad, what you like and what you don’t like, what’s clear and what’s ambiguous.  If you find it useful, so much the better!  If not, give it a few releases and watch the quality improve.

Tell me what you think, either in the comments or by email (jeff.keacher(at)nesota(dot)com), and leave a way to get in contact with you, and I’ll send you a coupon code for a free image processing credit.

Blur is dead!