Hi all,

I had one shot of getting an important image right, and of course managed to mess it up. I usually take blurry/shaken pictures and this one was no exception. However, due to the importance of the picture I figured I would try and see if maybe someone from this forum could point me in the right direction to make it slightly more decent.

Since it is a private photo for someone else, I cannot post the entire photo (and it would be too big anyway). have attached a cut out of a section of the photo. "1messy.jpg" shows a beaded necklace that probably provides enough information on the nature of the blur of the photo. "2clear.jpg" is the same necklace, this time photographed by someone who does know how to take decent pictures. First one was without flash, second with flash. Color is less important to me than detail. If that might be helpful, I can provide EXIF data for both shots.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have tried using Focus Magic (both stand alone and as a plugin in IrfanView) but have no clue which settings to use. Trial and error has not gotten me anywhere yet.

Regards,

Peter

Wittering, welcome to RetouchPRO!
Your image has a severe motion blur with a trail that is very long. The offset is so large that I do not think there is any way you can filter it. Depending on what the rest of the image looks like, you may be able to clone away certain parts of it to salvage areas that are essential.
Perhaps one of the other members here has some ideas.
Regards, Murray

I tend to agree with Murray. Hope maybe someone can help.

You got a whole lotta shakin' goin' on there.

Not hoping for much, I tried Unshake on it. I don't think it's much of an improvement.

Short of (a) a tripod and (b) a time machine to take you back to when you took the photo so that you can use (a), I can't think of any way to salvage this.

If someone with more knowhow in this area comes up with something better, I'll happily bow my head to the axe of correction.

You could do something like this. It will work a lot better with an image with more detail.
I just cloned out the original necklace, and then added the good on back in.

Thank you very much to all of you for giving this a try. I kind of figured it was too bad. I was in too much of a hurry (not to mention nervous) when taking the picture. A time machine would indeed be great!

This particular shot (just to be clear, it's a double necklace, one of black beads one of lighter beads) is not even 1/10th of the entire photo, so it will be impossible to clone all the important parts, but that is definitely something I will keep in mind should something like this happen again.

Again, thank you very much for the kind welcome and your quick responses. I will keep checking the thread just in case someone comes along posting about their time machine. Or some new CSI-like algorithm that can fix this :)

It all depends on if you want the finished product to look like a photo or not. I do some photo retouching and a lot of my clients want a much larger product than the orginal. This means the product is blurry due to loss of resolution. I have gotten around this by turning the photo into a pencil portrait and then smudging it. I also usally draw in portions of the image (such as shadows and edges) to further define the images. My clients like the effect. Please let me know if you would like an example...

You might have a look at http://www.niksoftware.com/learnmore/usa/entry.php?tab=2
they have a product called sharpener pro - the above url is for the demo