CKJ I took a copy of your image marked original, and ran it thru
amDCT(quality=4, adapt=31, quant=9, matrix=8, shift=5, qtype=1, expand=16, sharpWPos=6, sharpWAmt=24, sharpTPos=7, sharpTAmt=31, darkStart=64, darkAmt=10, brightStart=205, brightAmt=30)
The top left is the original. Top right is output from amDCT
The bottom left is the makediff of the original and the output of amDCT()
The bottom right is the makediff output expanded so the diff is more obvious.
Note that doing a lot of sharpening might cause flickering of the highlights between frames. One of the things that I would like to do is to pass a number of motion compensated frames to amDCT and use them for higher quality processing including flicker reduction. At one point I built a prototype out of smoothD2. It showed some promise but its speed was several seconds per frame. It is on my upgrade list after getting the main DCT processing loop to run on a gpu.
What the arguments are doing to the image.
Note that the image I am starting with will have gone thru a compression to .png and a decompression back to a frame for AviSynth. This process will have lost some detail in the image and might have introduced some more and different blocking than the image you are working with. Also the image you are seeing has gone thru another encoding decoding process.
My process in setting the values for amDCT for your image.
adapt=31
Note: Improvements needed frame size HD vs 480. interlaced converted to progressive often has smoothing done along the top and bottom edges of the blocks in a vertical column. This is not accounted for in the adaptation calculation. Among other things that the adaptation calculation is used for is to determine the strength of the block edge to block edge deblocking. If you really want to see the problems at the pixel and block edge level then in VirtualDub display your output setting zoom to 200%, 1to1 pixel, and point resize, and calibrate you monitors gray scale. Thats what I use. I don't recommend it. You will never be satisfied with any of your filters!!!
quant=9 Make as large as necessary to remove noise and blockiness.
and now I don't have any detail left.
darkStart=64, darkAmt=10 Find dark details that have been smoothed out. Use colors.exe available at
http://www.den4b.com/ to find the values of the dark details that have disappeared. Set darkStart larger then that value and darkAmt large enough to bring back some of the blacks.
expand=16 get most of the details back. Possibly go back and increase quant.
brightStart=205, brightAmt=30 Notice that expand has made some of the white highlights too bright. Use colors.exe program to see what the original values of the over brightened highlights are. Set brightStart lower than this value and the values above brightStart will be compressed toward brightStart by an amount controlled by brightAmt. This also reduces the blocking artifacts that show up as short thin bright lines.
sharpWPos=6, sharpWAmt=24, sharpTPos=7, sharpTAmt=31 start dialing in fine detail. Go back to quant and check the values.