[thomasgeorge]

I had wondered for some time about this plug-in and after trying a demo with only so-so results and reading what I could find, I decided to buy it as, I reasoned, Demos usually leave out the really neat stuff. In this case they didnt. Reading the Ads one would be led to believe that this program could do things that Photoshop and a few other full bodied programs either couldnt or that Varifocus was quicker/better or in some way had an advantage. 3 hours of using it however failed to convince me. For one thing it is slow. Using Photoshop and duplicating the background, blurring,applying a layer mask then either painting or applying a gradient to the layer mask produced the same effects in a much shorter time. Thats the bottom line,really. I think that if Varifocus was faster it could possibly be of some use but it is not,alas. For controlled focusing/defocusing the above mentioned technique was as good and faster. While Varifocus can also sharpen, well....not as well as can be done in Photoshop. I sadly must concur based on my use of this Plug-in that I can only rate it as an unnecessary addition. Save your money and use layer masks. On the bright side it never locked up and the blurs it produced were good, just not any better than could be done without it. That exhausts my toy budget for this month, but, perhaps I'll find a winner next time. Tom

[Vikki]

Tom,
That was a great review. Thanks!

[thomasgeorge]

Thanks Vikki. In the Plug-in jungle it gets down right hard to distinguish the good ones from the not-so good ones and it is possible to drop lots of hard earned bucks on something that sounds useful only to discover that you just bought a "bottle of snake oil". Tom

[DJ Dubovsky]

Another good review to use as a tool in shopping for plugins. Keep up the good work Tom.
DJ