Fixing a blurry old photo

Four kinds of blur

Focus blur comes from a lens set to the wrong distance: the background is sharp and the person is soft, or the reverse. Motion blur comes from a slow shutter: edges smear in one direction, often with a doubled outline. Print blur comes from the paper: a soft, matte or textured surface, or a print made from a small negative. Copy blur comes from the scan or phone photo you took of the print.

Copy blur is the easiest to fix, because you can simply retake it. Print blur and mild focus blur restore well. Heavy motion blur and a face that was never in focus are the hard cases.

What restoration can do

The restoration model rebuilds edges and texture from what is still there: the shape of the eyes, the line of the mouth, the pattern of the hair. Mild softness becomes crisp, grain is calmed, and small faces in a group photo gain enough detail to be recognised.

Then the upscale step raises the file to 4K or 8K so the sharpened detail survives printing. A 6×9 cm print scanned well can become a clean 30×40 cm print.

What it should not do

When the source has no detail, the only way to make a face sharp is to invent one. Some tools do exactly that, and the result is a stranger with your relative's haircut. Here the software is instructed to keep the likeness: no reshaping, no borrowed features, no smoothing. A very blurry face may come back cleaner but still soft, and we think that is the right outcome.

The free preview exists for this reason. If the face you get is not the face you remember, do not buy; or buy, press redo, and if nothing works, ask for a full refund even after download.

Retake the copy properly

Before blaming the original, check your copy. Most phone photos of a print are soft because of angle, glare or the camera focusing on the table.

• Scan on a flatbed at 300–600 dpi if you can; it beats any phone.
• With a phone: print flat, daylight from the side, no flash, no glare.
• Tap the face on screen to focus, hold still, take three shots and keep the sharpest.
• Fill the frame with the print; do not zoom digitally.
• Upload the original size, not a compressed copy from a chat app.

Group photos and small faces

In a group photo each face may be only a few hundred pixels wide. Restoration works face by face, so a well-scanned group picture usually comes back with every person recognisable. Crop only if you want one person; the software does better with the context of the whole photo.

Sharp enough to print

For a 30×40 cm print at 300 dpi you need 3543×4724 pixels; for 50×70 cm, 5906×8268. The Family archive pack ($19, ten photos) delivers the first size; Heirloom ($39) delivers both. Photos are deleted after 30 days and are never used to train anything.