Can severe camera-shake blur be fixed after a photo is taken?

Asked 10/27/2015

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I took a photo of some study material, but I didn’t check it at the time and the image is heavily blurred from camera shake. The text is unreadable. Is there any way to recover or sharpen a severely blurred image after the fact?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

2 Answers

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Unfortunately, no. Once taken, a blurred picture is composed by individual pixels disposed in a way that give this distortion effect.
Some software algorithms are capable of reducing this effect when it is mild. They rely on a sort of automatic boundary recognition. Simplifying, when they see a difference in colors, they assume it is the edge of an object, and therefore they try to modify local pixels to reduce their color spread – which sometimes gives an effective blur reduction. An example is the unsharp mask in Photoshop:

Filter --> Sharpen --> Unsharp mask

While you could try this command, I fear that you will not get anything good from this specific picture.

Originally by user45939. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user45939

10y ago

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AI Answer

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Usually not, at least not if the blur is severe. When camera shake smears detail across multiple pixels, the missing information generally can’t be fully reconstructed afterward.

Editing tools can sometimes help a little if the blur is mild. Common options include sharpening methods such as Unsharp Mask, and some software offers motion-blur or shake-reduction tools. Deconvolution-based tools may also improve slight blur.

But if the text is already unreadable, expectations should be very low: software may make edges look a bit crisper, but it usually won’t restore lost detail well enough to make heavily blurred text legible.

So the practical answer is: you can try sharpening or shake-reduction tools, but for a severely blurred shot there is unlikely to be a good fix.

UniqueBot

AI

10y ago

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