Help!!! I've got a blurry photo

[mr.gregg]

I hope someone can help me. I'm trying to restore a photo of my grandparents that looks fine until I recrop it to remove a lot of extra stuff but when I do, the image of my grandparents are fuzzy or blurry. I'm using paintshop pro 7 and have used the unsharp mask option but it didn't appear to help much. I've also used the retouch option in sharpen mode and it doesn't seem to help much either. I have tried adding a little uniform noise which I think might help. Any suggestions? Am I on the right track?

Thanks,
Gregg

[tyeise]

Can you post the original image here so we can see what you're talking about?

Tyeise

[mr.gregg]

Yes, here is the photo.

[LactoBeeZor]

Welcome to the list Mr. Gregg.

I am not a pro like several people here, but I tried a couple of methods and couldn't get any luck. I could get more detail but the blur remained. I also have several photos like this and will be interested to know a work around. I have understood though that there isn't alot that can be done.

[Doug Nelson]

You're never going to be able to restore missing detail. But you can use several methods to enhance edge contrast and therefore give the appearance of more sharpness. The most famous of these is the Unsharp Mask Filter.

However, I duplicated the background layer, applied the Highpass Filter at a very low setting, and set the blending mode to Linear Light. To intensify the effect I duplicated the highpass layer twice.

You'll notice an increase in grain and artifacts. That's part of the tradeoff.

[mr.gregg]

I appreciate the suggestions. The photo looked okay before I cropped it other than a little contrast problem but I wanted to crop it because there was a christmas tree and a little table I wanted to get rid of and that's when I got this blurry problem. It's almost like I've zoomed in on them but I haven't.

Thanks again to all,

Gregg

[Ed_L]

Gregg,

Is it possible to just replace the background, or is that not an option? Are you saying that the pic became blurry immediately after cropping, without any other adjustment? Any time you make an image appear larger, you enlarge the defects along with everything else. If it's just a slight bit fuzzy, it can become very noticeable when enlarged.

Ed

[roger_ele]

Mr.Gregg

I did something similar to Doug

First I duplicated the background, on this new layer I did the following
-opened curves and lowered highlight and raised shadow so that the contrast isn't raised too high in the next step
-ran unsharp mask with amount set to 33, radius to 250, threshold to 0. These groups the blurry objects which lowers some of the sharpening of the artifacts.
-desaturated layer
-changed layer to overlay mode
-ran hipass filter set at 1.8 (doesn't matter exactly the number, low enough not to overdue it)
-duplicated this overlay layer 4 times for a total of 5 overlay layers

There has been tones written on sharpening, most of which I have not waded through or understand - some pretty complicated. But this method is pretty easy.

I have found in a couple of situations I had an original to restore that is really small and blurry with tiny little cracks, by using unsharp mask with a small amount and a large radius the objects are grouped and become easier to see (sharper) without sharpening the little cracks. When I tried that with yours it didn't work very well.

Hope this helps, Roger

[mr.gregg]

Roger & Doug, the pictures look great. As I mentioned earlier, the picture is of my grandparents (my dad's parents). I thought I would try to clean up the picture a bit & tighten the picture some. I cropped it first before I did anything else, that's when I noticed the picture took on a fuzzy or blurry effect. I tried to scan the photo @ about 600 dpi, I think I've got plenty of dots or pixels. I'm sure dad will appreciate your efforts.

Gregg