Can I combine several low quality pics into one higher quality picture?

Question

Is there an easy tool to combine low quality pics taken from a mobile phone, all of the same thing but taken within a few seconds interval from one another, mostly suffering from slight out of focus issues? How can I combine them into higher quality?

EDIT: Apparently the concept is stacking: "focus stacking is taking several images of the same object(s) which are partially in focus and combining them in such a way as to keep the sharp parts and get rid of the blurry ones"

Answer 1

Astrophotographers have been combining similar images for years. This is called "stacking" and there is special purpose software for it. You have great reductions in both noise and in some cases, clarity, than could ever be achieved with a single exposure.

However, there is a big but to this. The prime purpose of stacking is to eliminate noise from really dim objects. It is common for have exposures that are 1-2 minutes long and to combine dozens of these. This doesn't sound like what you want.

I did mention clarity, that sounds like what you are looking for but you will also be disappointed. The best lunar photography today is done with webcams. Yeah, webcams. The trick there is that you have thousands of exposure, most of which are crap since the atmosphere jiggles. But, with a movie made from a web cam, you can discard most of them, looking for those few clear shots. You then take those clear shots and stack them.

Then point at a different place on the moon and do it all over again.

Then again, this isn't what you want, but it is cool.

Answer 2

I found a piece of software in Linux that does stacking of images: ale

ale IMAG0626.jpg IMAG0627.jpg IMAG0628.jpg output.jpg
Output file will be 'output.jpg'.                                                                                                                                        
Original Frame:                                                                                                                                                          
 'IMAG0626.jpg'.                                                                                                                                                         
Supplemental Frames:                                                                                                                                                     
 'IMAG0627.jpg'*** okay (92.930228% match).                                                                                                                              
 'IMAG0628.jpg'*** okay (94.896616% match).                                                                                                                              
Re-filtering incremental results.                                                                                                                                        
Iterating Irani-Peleg.                                                                                                                                                   
Average match: 93.913422%                                                                       

Answer 3

After some googling I found a windows program called CombineZP on this minimalistic website. The Zip archive contains sources which means you might be able to port this to other OSses.

My results were not very good but I must admit that I totally didn't know what am I doing:

^{One of 20 similar samples}

Answer 4

You can use ImageMagick like this :

convert  -verbose *.jpg -combine combined.jpg