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Unblur Is Not Enlarge

Unblurring is not enlarging

An enlarger makes a picture bigger. If the picture was blurred when it was taken, a bigger picture is a bigger blur. Here is how to tell the two problems apart.

Two problems that look alike

A size problem: the picture is sharp at its own size and simply has too few pixels for where it is going. Look at it at 100% — edges are crisp, letters are readable, it is just small.

A blur problem: the picture is soft even at 100%. Focus missed, the camera moved, or something smeared it. More pixels will not fix that, because the detail was never recorded.

Check at 100% first. If it is sharp there, enlarge. If it is soft there, enlarging only makes the softness bigger.

What helps which

Problem and remedy
You haveHelpsDoes not help
Too few pixels, sharpEnlarging (Lanczos, Mitchell, edge-guided)Sharpening hard
JPEG blocks or noiseClean-up before enlargingEnlarging first
Slight softnessGuarded detail, gentlyLarge detail amounts — halos
Focus or motion blurDeconvolution in a photo editor, or a new photoAny enlarger

And the trained models?

A model can draw sharp-looking edges into a soft picture. Those edges are its guess, not the scene. On text and faces that guess can be confidently wrong — a different letter, a different face.

What this site will and will not do

It will enlarge, clean up before enlarging, and put back local contrast under a halo guard. It will not claim to unblur. The honest names for blur repair are unsharp masking and deconvolution; they belong in a photo editor with a preview, and a missed focus is often best fixed by taking the photo again.

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