Severely Blurred sentimental photo

[cobaltchris]

My Aunt has asked me to try and fix a photo of her father taken their last holiday together. He has recently passed away and this photo means a lot to her. The picture is very blurry and I don't know if it can be fixed. I am a beginner, I've only done some basic restoring of old family photo's, and this picture is way beyond my skill level. I use photoshop elements 2.0 but I'm not really sure what tools to try besides the unsharp mask and I'm not getting very good results. It could be that I am doing something wrong, but I'm not sure where to start or even if there is any hope for such a blurry photo. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Kraellin]

chris,

welcome to retouchpro!

that pic is pretty far gone, but i did manage to help it a bit. the first thing i did was resize it by 50% and then by 50% again. then, i ran it through 'Unshake', a program for handling blurs and camera shake images. after that i ran it through paint shop pro 7, the salt and pepper filter at 5/5 to clean it up a bit.

now, you might get it even better by running multiple passes through unshake or unshake, then a noise reducer, then unshake again and so on.

the settings i used in unshake were 'severe blur', 'portrait', 'amplification 10', x1.

i'm posting a copy.

Craig

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Chris,

basically the bad news is there's nothing you can do to that image that will give you what you want, which is a crisp sharply focused picture.

The sharpness filters do not really sharpen as such, what they do is emphasise edges by increasing their contrast. This causes an optical illusion that tricks the eye into seeing a sharper image.

However, this only works with images which are only a very little bit blurred, for an image as blurred as yours there really is not a cure.

Craigs attempt is probably a good as you're going to get, and I suspect it's a long way short of what you'd hoped for.

[cobaltchris]

I was afraid that it wasn't going to be possible to get a good sharp image with it being so blurry. I really appreciate y'all taking the time to help me out.

[krishna]

Ran the low pass filter, resized it and applied deconvolution filter and finally reduced the image size, in an attempt to extract some possible features. My trial was done in AstraImage. Since several attempts were made I do not remember the order or settings.

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krishna