Unblur Old Photos

Blur in an old photograph comes from a few places. The camera moved during a slow exposure, which smears everything in one direction. The focus was set a little short, so the faces are soft and the fence behind them is sharp. Or the print itself is small and was copied from a copy, and the softness is baked into the paper. Unblur Old Photos addresses all three. It recovers crisp edges and fine texture, removes the streak of motion blur and camera shake, and does it without the halos and crunchy edges that a simple sharpening filter leaves behind. The instructions also tell the AI not to invent detail: where the original carried nothing, nothing is made up.

The Sharpen select sets the priority. Whole photo treats the frame evenly and is the right choice for landscapes, buildings and street scenes. Faces first gives the faces the closest attention and then brings the rest of the frame up to match, which is what most family photos want. Fine details is for the things people squint at: text on a shop sign, the pattern of a dress, a brooch, the weave of a jacket, strands of hair. That mode is useful for genealogy work where a name on a sign or a badge on a uniform is the whole point of the photograph. A note on what to expect: the recovered sharpness is limited to what the pixels can support, so a heavy blur becomes a mild one rather than a crisp image.

Upload the largest file you have, because sharpening is limited by how much information is in the pixels to begin with. A 300 dpi scan of a small print will sharpen far better than a screenshot of it. Results keep the shape of the upload and return in seconds. If the faces are the only thing that matters and they are very small, Face Restoration on the Strong setting goes further than this tool will; if the photo is noisy as well as soft, remove the grain first so the AI does not sharpen the noise. A sharpened print will show its scratches and spots more clearly than the soft original did, which is a good reason to run the repair tools next if it has any, and the Studio makes that a single further step from the result.