Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud (CC), despite any misgivings that you might have about Adobe’s shift to a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, is the best image editor in the world. It takes the strong legacy left behind by CS5, which introduced Content-Aware Fill and Refine Edge, the performance boosts and interface improvements introduced in CS6, and adds its own set of killer features and performance tweaks. If you thought that Content-Aware Fill was awesome, the new Smart Sharpen, Shake Reduction, and Camera Raw filters will blow your mind.

Today we’re going to look at Shake Reduction, which can almost eliminate blurriness caused by most kinds of camera motion (linear, rotational, zigzag, and arc-shaped motion). In short, this means that most blur caused by telephoto lenses, or indoor photos of still objects taken with a slow shutter speed and no flash, can be rectified by Shake Reduction. As you can see in the video below, where the subject itself is moving, the efficacy of Shake Reduction is significantly impaired.

How Shake Reduction works

Like most of Adobe’s recent feature additions, such as the Content-Aware tools and Refine Edge, most of the magic is performed by some very clever computer vision algorithms. These algorithms analyze your photos with incredible depth, looking for edges, patterns, and objects. Shake Reduction, in essence, looks for the ghosting in your picture, probably via edge detection, and then reconstructs the path that your camera took during the exposure. As an example, one of the most common kinds of cameras shake, linear, is caused by the whole camera moving downwards as you push down on the shutter button. This causes very characteristic ghosting, which can then backtracked and “compressed” into a de-blurred image. The same method can be used on rotational, zigzag, and arc-shaped motion, as long as Adobe’s algorithm can successfully work out which kind of blur afflicts your photo.

As you can see in the video above, and in the sample images at the top of the story (larger) and below, Shake Reduction never removes all of the blur caused by camera shake, but it does a damn good job of it in some cases. You won’t be using shake-reduced photos in magazines, but it’s still a very powerful tool for recovering blurry holiday snaps, or sharpening the occasional product photo that’s just a little too blurry.

Now read: Bring out the GIMP: Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite to become subscription-only