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Someone else took this picture of me and didn't focus. :(

How can I fix this? Is there an app for that? I don't have Photoshop.

blurred image

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    \$\begingroup\$ Except, this one specifically says "I don't have Photoshop." \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Aug 26, 2017 at 16:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ We've also got the same previous question for GIMP and other applications. \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Aug 26, 2017 at 18:17
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    \$\begingroup\$ Keep in mind that photo editing is not magic. If it were possible to perfectly re-focus an out-of-focus image, nobody would bother to focus in the first place. \$\endgroup\$
    – osullic
    Aug 26, 2017 at 18:32
  • \$\begingroup\$ How can slightly blurred photos be improved in post processing? \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Aug 26, 2017 at 18:49
  • \$\begingroup\$ sharpen blurred photo. \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Aug 26, 2017 at 18:49

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You can't make it perfect, but there's an algorithm with the fancy name "Richardson–Lucy deconvolution" which can get impressive results.

The open source and free software program G'Mic has a feature to do this. It's implemented as a plugin for GIMP. You can find it in the "Details" section of the G'MIC plugin, which is under the Filters menu.

gmic

Play around with the sliders. "Sigma" is the most important; it basically corresponds to how big the blur circles are. Somewhere around 4 seemed to work for this image. I ran it with 100 iterations; this makes more speckling but has a stronger sharpening effect, too.

The image is also significantly unfderexposed — probably the camera was fooled by those bright lights in the backround — so I used a quick shadows & highlight adjustment too. You could also play around with those manually to get things better, but this is a quick fix. The resulting image has some speckling and other artifacts; I think for a final result you'd want to do some by-hand touchup. But this should get you started.

edited in gmic

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  • \$\begingroup\$ @scottbb Replaced with a version done in G'MIC, which allows much more extreme adjustment. \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Dec 25, 2018 at 18:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ Could it be an idea to add the original reference to Rawtherapee? Reading the original answer I was wondering whether it was also possible with RT, until I looked at the answer's history \$\endgroup\$
    – clabacchio
    Feb 21, 2019 at 16:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ @clabacchio I could. I switched it to G'Mic because this particular image needs a value higher than the (I think arbitrary, although I haven't dug into the code to see) scale limit in Rawtherapee. \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Feb 21, 2019 at 16:48

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