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.