How to Fix a Blurry Photo (and When You Can't)

First, work out which kind of blur it is

Zoom into the photo at 100% and look at a hard edge — the frame of a door, the edge of a sign, an eye. Three things can be going on, and they respond to fixes completely differently.

Soft focus: the edge is there but gentle, spread over a few pixels evenly in every direction. Everything in the frame is slightly soft, or one plane is sharp and the subject is not. This is the fixable kind.

Motion blur: the edge is dragged into a streak in one direction, lights have tails, text is doubled. Either the camera moved during a slow shutter or the subject did. Partly fixable at best.

Low resolution: the photo is not blurry so much as small, and looks soft because it has been enlarged — a thumbnail, a screenshot of a screenshot, an old message attachment. Sharpening helps more than you would expect, but only within limits.

Fixing soft focus in the browser

For soft focus, sharpening is the right fix and it works on a phone as well as a laptop. Open the deblur tool, drop the photo in, leave the mode on Unsharp, and raise the strength while watching a hard edge.

Stop the moment a bright rim appears along dark edges. That halo is the universal sign of over-sharpening, and once it is there the photo looks processed rather than sharp. On most slightly soft photos the sweet spot is somewhere around the lower-middle of the slider.

If the photo looks flat rather than fuzzy — colours fine, edges present, but no bite — switch to Detail, which boosts fine texture without touching large edges. If it is visibly soft and Unsharp is not doing enough, try Strong, but expect to keep the strength low because it amplifies noise as well as edges.

• Open the deblur tool and drop the photo in.
• Mode: Unsharp. Raise strength until edges tighten.
• Zoom to 100%. Back off at the first halo.
• Download. The original is untouched, so you can try again.

What to expect from motion blur

Motion blur is directional, and a sharpener has no idea which direction. It will tighten the edges that happen to run parallel to the movement and leave the smeared ones smeared. The result is usually more legible — a number plate goes from unreadable to guessable — but not sharp.

Deconvolution tools that estimate the motion path and reverse it exist in desktop software, and they do work on short, straight, uniform motion. They fail on the common case, which is a hand-held phone wobbling in two directions during a half-second exposure. If a photo matters enough to try, a desktop tool is the next step; if it does not, accept the sharpened version.

When the photo is small rather than blurry

A photo that has been through a messaging app, a social feed or a screenshot has usually been downscaled and recompressed more than once. Enlarging it makes it look blurry because every real pixel is now smeared over four or nine screen pixels.

Sharpening after enlargement works well here because upscaling produces exactly the kind of low-contrast edges unsharp masking is designed to lift. Two cautions. First, sharpen at the size you will actually view it — sharpening a tiny image and then enlarging it enlarges the halos too. Second, heavy JPEG compression leaves block boundaries, and sharpening makes those visible as a grid in smooth areas, so keep the strength modest.

If you can get the original — from the person who took it, from the camera roll rather than the chat, from the cloud backup — that beats any amount of processing.

Order matters when you are doing more than one thing

Sharpen last. Resizing, compressing and colour fixes all change edge contrast, and sharpening before them either gets undone or gets doubled into halos.

If the photo is noisy — grainy in the shadows, speckled sky — the ideal order is denoise, then sharpen, because a sharpener cannot tell noise from detail and will amplify both. If you do not have a denoise step, the practical version is simply to sharpen less than you want to.

If it needs to be sent somewhere with a size limit, sharpen at full size, then compress. Compression after sharpening keeps the crispness; sharpening after compression amplifies the compression artefacts.

Avoiding the problem next time

Tap to focus on the subject before shooting, especially with a face slightly off-centre; phone autofocus loves the background.

In low light, brace the phone against something or use the volume button as the shutter — the tap on the screen is often what causes the shake.

Burst mode is the cheapest insurance. Hold the shutter, take ten, keep the sharpest.

Send originals. If a photo is going to someone who might need it sharp, share the file rather than a chat-compressed copy, or send it as a document rather than a photo in messaging apps that offer the choice.

Frequently asked questions