sharpening

[mpskin]

Is there any way to get this picture sharper? The original was a mess..lighting really bad and very fuzzy...also if the pic is salvageable as far as sharpening goes what can i do to the background to make it look nicer?

[Barbie Hocking]

I did an unsharp mask of 374/1.2/8. I deselected the background, their shoes, and the scratches. Only the facial features of their faces were selected to prevent too much noise. I didn't do any cloning, but cloning will allow you to clean up the double images of their hands.

[Ed_L]

This was done very quickly, and I did nothing but sharpen the image. I duplicated the background layer. I used USM at amount = 500, radius = .7, and threshold = 0. I then duplicated this layer, and set the blending mode to lighten. The layer below was set to darken. The "darken" layer was set to 70% opacity, and the "lighten" layer was set to 60%. When you set the first duplicate layer to "darken", you can adjust the opacity for best results. This layer shows the pixels that were darkened when using USM. Do the same with the "lighten" layer. These pixels were the ones that were made lighter by the USM.

Ed

[Ed_L]

Hopefully, the image will appear this time.

Ed

[Guest]

The problem with this picture isn't the sharpness but the double image lines. Were these added by merging on mismatched layers, or did they get in there by camera movement? If the ghost lines are in the original, then you may have to clone them out. As it is now, sharpening will just make the picture worse, in my opinion, since it will emphasize these lines even more.

Phyllis

[VisualEyes]

Phyllis is right about the double exposure/shaky lines. Sharpening just enhances it. Here is color correction with levels adjustment, removed/replaced background, and about 20 minutes of cloning.

[Stephen M]

A link to further links on sharpening:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/PSTV_links.html#S

Stephen Marsh.

[jeaniesa]

I was searching for something else, but came across this thread which may provide some useful info.

Jeanie

[Asiva]

My Try

Well the other posters are correct, it's near impossible to fix a shaky camera shot. However, adjusting the contrast and remove the blue cast does bring out some detail. Additionally I used Asiva to apply sharpening only to the midtones and that eliminated bringing out too much of the noise in the shadows and the lower saturated areas of the image. It'll probably look better when Asiva is used on the original image that does not have the jpeg compression artifacts.
Hope this looks ok to you.

sharpen and remove blue