I just did a restoration that was a real blurry, small original. It also had a lot of tiny speckaling white and black spots. I discovered a sharpening techique while playing around with it;

-Used a real low amount setting, about 25
-Used a high radias to raise the contrast with-in the big areas of blurryness
-Just enough threshold to look good

This defined the shapes of the blurry image and removed the little speckled spots in one pass. Got a heady rush of euphoria ...

Roger

There's nothing like the joy of discovering something that could save so many tears in the future:) - Out of interest have you had chance to try the method on another photo of similar condition?

Stephen Marsh has a great site devoted to this and many other techniques for photoshop and digital editing, if you scan down this page he has a section on Sharpening and USM, also many more links on photo editing etc..http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/PSTV_links.html#M

Hi Mike, I have tried this on other photos and it hasn't worked - it seems the image has to be really blurry in order to group the blurriness into higher contrast "grouped blobs" that give the illusion of more detail - and have the side effect of cleaning up the image.

Thanks for the reply and the link, I will check it out.

Roger