Scanning Folders Of Photos To Find The Sharpest

[#1]

Hi guys!

I use Photoshop CC and was wondering if Adobe has a system for scanning folders of photos to find the sharpest of them?

[#2]

Hi guys!

I use Photoshop CC and was wondering if Adobe has a system for scanning folders of photos to find the sharpest of them?

[#3]

Are you referring to

Edit > Auto Blend Layers

? 

Edit: I suspect I may have misinterpreted the question. 

Do you mean a Folder of images on your computer and you want some automated method to sort out the ones that are not in focus? 

[#4]

I can try that but what I’m enquiring about is a quick way of finding the
sharpest photo in a folder rather than manually going through them.

[#5]

What kind of of photos are we talking about? 

From one studio shoot (so a relatively fixed background but moving subjects), from an event-shoot like a wedding (so dfferent sibjects, different camera positions, different cameras even, …), scientific material (like microscopy …), …? 

[#6]

I do landscapes. I try to go for front to back sharpness. 

[#7]

As @D Fosse already mentioned this would not be a great automation task for Photoshop itself (each image would have to be opened and that could be quite time-intensive), so maybe post a Bridge Feature Request over on 

Photoshop Family

[#8]

Yes.

[#9]

Not as such. The problem is that an automatic procedure can't know what part of the image you need in focus.

This could make a sensible feature request - but it would probably have to be in Bridge, not Photoshop. It would have to let you select a range of photos, then mark the area of interest. It's a bit out of Bridge's current mode of operation. Photoshop isn't a file browser, so you'd have to open them all first.

There is a way to get there in Photoshop if all the shots are similar - stack them and run Auto-merge set to stacking (not panorama). This will pick the sharpest area in each frame and you can just note which one has the area you want to be in focus. Then dismiss.

You might find manual review faster, though. Bridge has a loupe function for this.

[#10]

Thanks for the info!
I’ll try those!😀

[#11]

This indeed is a task for Adobe Sensei machine learning.

Perhaps some ideas in this Bridge topic thread, which in the end was implemented as a Photoshop script, however, it probably could have been a Bridge script that used BridgeTalk to use Photoshop features where needed.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/bridge/sort-bright-photos-from-dark-photos-in-bridge/m-p/9240332

I have not performed exhaustive testing, but all things being equal, a lower standard deviation histogram value should indicate a sharper image than a softer image, for what that is worth. This is far from being perfect but may help to semi-automate the process somewhat. Using techniques such as 'frequency separation' one may be able to fine tune results however this would add a lot more time to process each image.