How to Correct Blurred Pictures in DPP or LRC

[Cantrell]

All,

Attended my grandson's honor roll assembly yesterday. Took my R6M2 with the 24-240mm lens. I shot RAW with Aperture priority and AUTO ISO. Some of the pictures have a slight blur. Is there a setting in DPP or LRC that I can use in the processing the correct that blur? 

Thanks in advance for your responses.

[p4pictures · Accepted solution]

This will largely depend on what the blur is, and how blurred it is. 

For example if the camera selected a very slow shutter speed eg 1/30th or 1/15th and there are moving people in the shots then I would except to see some blurred heads and faces, a little extra sharpening and or clarity applied to those areas may help them to look a bit sharper. If your camera managed to miss focus on the intended subject, and focused on something behind or in front of the subject then this is very hard to fix in the edit. 

It would be best to share an image or two that show the kind of blur you want to try and fix.

[Cantrell]

Brian,

Thank you for your response. Shutter speed was the problem. Needed to be faster. Should have shot in Manual, but picked Aperture because I did not want to make changes at the last moment and miss the shot. I appreciate your input.

Reese

[jrhoffman75]

---

@Cantrell wrote:

Brian,

Thank you for your response. Shutter speed was the problem. Needed to be faster. Should have shot in Manual, but picked Aperture because I did not want to make changes at the last moment and miss the shot. I appreciate your input.

Reese

---

Download a trial of Topaz Labs Photo and see if it can improve the images. Depends on how blurred they are. 

[Cantrell]

John,

Thank you for the recommendation.

Reese

[Cantrell]

Brian,

I processed the pictures and Clarity helped with 2 pictures. The other 2 are going to need additional help. My grandson was walking straight at me and changes could not be made fast enough. Probably would not have been any better if I had shot in Manual.

Reese

[johnrmoyer]

---

@Cantrell wrote:

Brian,

I processed the pictures and Clarity helped with 2 pictures. The other 2 are going to need additional help. My grandson was walking straight at me and changes could not be made fast enough. Probably would not have been any better if I had shot in Manual.

Reese

---

Unsharp mask can make the images appear less blurred. For unsharp mask, the radius should be the size of the blur in pixels. One can zoom to 400% and count pixels on an edge to see how large the radius should be. I Canon DPP, I often get good results by setting unsharp mask amount and radius relatively large and setting "clarity" to "-2".

After unsharp mask, scaling the image down followed by a second unsharp mask can make a smaller version of the image look less blurred. This works especially well if the image will be downscaled for viewing on a screen. In Canon DPP, the down scale may be done by selecting the "resize" box when saving. If the image is saved from DPP as a 16 bit TIFF, then using Gimp free software to edit the TIF file one may do the second unsharp mask before exporting as a JPG file. 

Experiment with the amount and threshold for unsharp mask until it looks better to you. Too large an amount will result in halo looking artifacts at edges and too small a threshold will result in artifacts that look like edges in what should have been a color gradient. 

Digital lens optimizer in Canon DPP can also make images look sharper sometimes if the blur happens to be similar enough to small aperture diffraction blur with a nearly circular aperture. 

If you happened to have the camera set to save DPRAW files, then DPRAW processing in DPP can move the focal point slightly forward or back or if not moving the focal point increase the apparent depth of field. For motion blur, this may accidentally make it look better by setting the forward/back to zero and the amount to 8 or 9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking 

[Cantrell]

John,

Sorry for the slow response. Thank you very much for this information. I do not know if the AF settings would have any baring on the blurred photo, but I had the AF operation set at One Shot instead of Servo, AF Area at 1-point AF instead of Whole Area and Subject to detect vehicles instead of People. I doubt that is the reason. The shutter speed was too slow.

Reese

[ebiggs1]

A better app to use to try and correct a blurry image is Photoshop. Using Photoshop try using AI with the Neural Filters' Photo Restoration tool. If it is too far gone try using Generative Fill to reconstruct areas.

OOF or blurry images is one of the most difficult things to correct in post. Basically all most editors filters do is find the edge of a subject and darken it. The problem here is how much because you don't want some edges darkened at all.

Clarity does this. So keep in mind a little can be good but a lot might not.

[Cantrell]

ebiggs1,

Thank you for your response and suggestions.

Reese