Improving blurry photos

[cdaught]

Hello,

I'm wondering if anybody has any tips, tricks, suggestions, recommendations of what to do to improve a blurry or out of focus photo.

I don't have a specific photo in mind when asking this question. I guess it's more of a general question as I've come across blurry images and usually decide they're a lost cause, but I bet someone here has some ideas of what sorts of things you can try to get a blurry picture to look sharper.

The only way I can imagine to improve an image that's out of focus is to rebuild parts of it by drawing, cloning from sharper areas of the image, pasting in facial features from other photos?? Any other ideas?

Thanks

[thomasgeorge]

Some of the Astronomy image processing programs have Deconvolution routines...Lucy Richardson ( or Richardson lucy depending who writes about it) and Maximum entropy, which can do a good job of sharpening a blurred image, but these programs start at about $300.00 and the results are variable, as in sometimes they work and sometimes they dont, plus it takes a lot of experimentation to get good results. The routines also take a long time to run. Other than that, there isnt much I know about which works... Tom

[Ed_L]

If the photo is only slightly out of focus, you might try some of the sharpening techniques found in the forums. You could do a search for "sharpening". I'm not sure just how much help this will be, but there's one thread at http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/sho...=smart+sharpen

Ed

[wcook]

There is a program I have played around with called focus magic. It allows you to select a small area to see how the focusing will look before doing the entire photo. It takes a while to run the program, costs about $40, but seems to help. WC

[Doug Nelson]

Can we get a URL for Focus Magic?

[thomasgeorge]

Thats a neat little program. I played with the demo version and it does help..it wont make a blurred/out of focus photo pristine, but it definately helps..it also allows for some blurring/softening effects and some noise removal. It is worth looking into...Tom

[thomasgeorge]

Oops...here's the link...sorry http://www.focusmagic.com/

Tom

[Mike]

If you are reproducing a photo that is somewhat fuzzy, try selling them a smaller sized copy. Depending on just how bad the orginal is, sometimes this will make the customer more satisfied. Whatever you do do not try to make the copy larger than the orginal!
Mike