We have all suffered the disappointment when we download our shots to find one or two of the photographs we have taken are little out of focus or blurred.
Or we have some old film photographs that are not as sharp as they should have been and have not been developed to their full and desired effect.
The question is, can anything be done to rectify the image?
Well providing the image is not too badly out of focus or blurred and you have some decent post processing software the answer I have found is yes!
I was recently asked if I would digitise some old photographs for a neighbour so they could share the memories amongst their family members and with the lady's permission I would like to share the results of one photograph that worked very well.
This image is from a 10 x 8 inch black and white photograph and was scanned with a large pixel count of 800 of the lady as a young girl at dress rehearsal for Snow White.
As you can see the definition in the scanned image (and the original) is not very well defined and is in my opinion blurred or even the result of the shot being taken slightly out of focus.
Using Adobe CS5 Enterprise student edition (pinched off my daughter) here a few tips to hopefully help anyone who may find the need - and have the time to rectify a photograph with this type of problem.
1. open up the image and create a duplicate layer, drag the background thumbnail in the layers pallet to the bottom second from left icon and release you will now have two layers, background and background copy.
2. On the top menu selection bar select FILTER then OTHER and then HIGH PASS.
3. Set the HIGH PASS radius so you can just begin to see the outline of the images in the photograph appear - this is important - this can be as low a value as 1 or as high as 6, for a good result do not select too high a number - you may need to experiment at his stage.
4.Double click the greyed out background copy thumbnail in the layers pallet and this will bring up the blending options. In the blending mode drop down select any option (in the group Overlay to Hardmix) the vivid light being the option selected for my image and reduce the opacity to 67%. Again you have to play about to get the right result as 100% in many cases is too strong. Once happy with the result hit OK.
5. you now need to flatten the image that is to merge the layers together to see the result, so select LAYER from the top menu options then FLATTEN.
6. If you find that this process has accentuated noise on the image you can reduce it using the FILTER, NOISE reduce noise options as normal.
7. Further sharpening if required is best done by selecting IMAGE, MODE,LAB COLOUR. Select CHANNELS (bottom right next to layers) select the lightness thumbnail by clicking on it once. Back up to the menu bar select FILTER, SHARPEN, UNSHARP MASK and use the settings Amount = 85, Radius= 4 and threshold = 1 and apply. If you think the image has been over done select EDIT from the top menus then FADE UNSHARP MASK and use the slider to reduce the effect of the unsharp mask filter. Once happy with the result select IMAGE from the top menu, MODE and revert the image back to RGB Colour, apply the auto tone function from the image option on the top menu to balance the final image then you can save the image to a jpeg or what ever your preference is.
This is the result of the above process:
All I need now is on of them photoshop programmes, one day I suppose, but...that fella that got sacked from your workplace, was that because it was on a registered business/work computer and not a personal home computer? Just wondered if that was the difference as to why some action was taken by the photoshop company to bother tracing this computer etc.
Well, now I have something to enquire about, fingers xed.
