Blurry Photo Fixing?

[Noah212]

What can one do in Photoshop to make the blurriness less noticeable in a slightly blurry photo?

Thanks.

 

[KmH]

To a certain degree that depends on what caused the blur and how much blur there is.

If it's motion blur, forget trying to fix it- reshoot.

If it's camera shake, forget it - improve your camera holding technique or get a tripod.

If it's blur from missed focus, forget it, see all the above.

If it's a soft blur from the AA (anti-aliasing) filter on your image sensor and/or soft focus from a lens with to wide or to small an aperture, you can try a couple of things.

1. You can open the image in ACR and if you have CS4 use the ACR sharpening tool as a start
2. then use the 'Clarity' slider in ACR's basic adjustments (watch for halos).
3. then, in the regular Photoshop work space you can apply the USM (unsharp mask) filter.

 

[Overread]

Basically what KmH said. Blur is one thing photoshop can't fix!
Ok it might be able to, but you are looking at a lot of serious hours of reconstruction to get the look right and its not the sort of stuff you will learn quickly (unless you have a background in digital art). Basically blur is a factor we can't get rid of so it really is a case of reshooting to eliminate it (unless you want to specifically capture a shot with blur)

 

[rufus5150]

Smart sharpen can sometimes (read: rarely) address minor (read: very minor) blur issues (did I mention rarely and very minor?).

Depending on the target... let's say you have a 5000x4000 image that looks blurry, if your target is a web graphic at say 250x200, simply shrinking it will do wonders.

But what KmH said is true in 99.999% of situations.

 

[Jeremy Z]

Agree with above. The lesson to learn from this is that a higher ISO and resulting noise is preferable to trying to use too slow of a shutter speed for the situation. Software can fix noise much more easily than blur.

You probably already knew that, but it was worth mentioning.

 

[Big Mike]

As mentioned, it's not really something you can fix.

However, the question was:

What can one do in Photoshop to make the blurriness less noticeable in a slightly blurry photo?

There are unlimited ways to make it less noticeable. Just open up the Photoshop filters dialog and preview all the different filter effects.

 

[gsgary]

Right click delete is the best thing for blurred photos

 

[Robert Chaparro]

hi, i agree with the above comment. you should try it.

 

[Hamtastic]

Start with the things mentioned above, such as the clarity slider in CS or LR. In CS make a duplicate layer. Switch blend mode to luminosity. Run unsharp mask with a high radius: 20-60? You can play with the percentage (or layer opacity) and preview the effect. This isn't really sharpening, but it's tweaking the local contrast and edges in a way that human vision perceives as sharper looking. It's going to depend a lot on the subject and how blurry.

In Lee Varis' book "Skin" he details a sharpening technique where he takes 4 layers of the above technique at different intensities (from a little to a lot), and then varies the opacity to taste. It's not as good as doing it right in the first place, but it's better than nothing.

Another trick is to add luminous noise or grain. Once again it fools the human eye into thinking it's seeing detail and sharpness that isn't really there.

Edit: That Lee Varis technique is called Octave Sharpening. Google it for numerous tutorials.

 

[Mike_E]

look here. might help

Recover Detail and Sharpen Your Blurred Photos

 

[burstintoflame81]

Duplicate your background layer. Right click and "convert to a smart object". Then go to filters ->Other->High Pass. Adjust the radius until you can just barely start to see some of the picture ( probably like 2% for a normal pic, but if you need a lot more, jump it up to maybe like 5% and see how it looks. ) and then click ok. Then go to that layer and change it to "Overlay" You can always go back and double click on the HIGH PASS listed under that layer and re-adjust as needed.

As others said, this isn't going to fix the problem. Its very easy to oversharpen and introduce a lot of noise. Just because its no longer as blurry doesn't mean its better, you could in fact make it just as worse in another area. If its got definitive shapes in the pic, you could always go the other way and intentionally blur it to give a sort of dreamlike, ambiguous feel to the pic. Maybe not what you want, but atleast the pic wouldn't be a total waste.