Found an old photo in the bins? Unfortunately, paper is not the most reliable medium, and the discovered photograph, almost a hundred years old, is unlikely to boast of gloss and clarity of the image. Don’t rush to mourn a damaged photo or spend money on a professional restorer, you can restore it yourself! A convenient program for photo restoration, PhotoMASTER, will come to the rescue. Read how to restore an old photograph to its original appearance and preserve family history.

PhotoMASTER will help restore even badly damaged photos

Restoring photos in the PhotoMASTER editor

To protect a valuable family heirloom from further destruction and return it to its original appearance, you need to convert a paper photograph into a digital format. The easiest way to do this is with a regular camera or smartphone. However, this method has disadvantages:

• third-party light sources may leave on glare in the photo,
• the photo may turn out blurry and unclear,
• Uneven camera position distorts the image.

Ideally, it is better to scan the photo, as this will preserve the original colors and avoid glare.

Now that you have a digital copy, you need to download a program for restoring old photographs from our website. Install it on your computer and run it. Open the scanned image in PhotoMASTER and let's get started.

Restoration step by step

• Cutting off the damaged edge

If the edges of the photo are very frayed, which is very likely after so much time, it is better to get rid of them immediately without regret. Go to the “Composition” section and select “Cropping”. PhotoMASTER offers several cropping options: free frame proportions, maintaining the original proportions, as well as a number of standard aspect ratios: for a VKontakte post, for iPhone and iPad, size 4:3 and others. Choose a grid type that will help you frame the image correctly.

Trim the frayed edges and yellowed frame

Now frame the part of the photo that you want to leave. The main thing is not to get too carried away so as not to spoil the composition. In cases where the defects at the edges are too deep, for example, the picture is torn to the middle, it is better to partially correct the problem areas with retouching.

• We remove defects

You should be patient, as this part of the processing is the most labor-intensive. However, restoring photographs in Photoshop and other editors takes no less time. At the same time, it is much easier to master PhotoMASTER, and it also has convenient tools for quickly removing defects in photos.

Go to the "Retouching" section. Here you will find a whole set of tools that will help you disguise torn corners, eliminate traces of bends, hide stains that have appeared over time and similar problems.

The main work tool will be healing brush. It will cope perfectly with both pinpoint defects and large damage. Adjust the brush size according to the area of ​​the problem area. If you need to remove a stain from a photo, click the brush exactly in the middle and the defect will disappear. If you need to remove a scratch, carefully brush along it.

Removing a scratch from a photo

In a similar way, you will have to completely retouch the photo. Be patient and you will be rewarded with amazing results! If the brush categorically does not “take” some defects, leave them for processing with the next tool, which we will discuss later.

Photo before and after using a healing brush

Another very useful feature is stamp. It will allow you to quickly and effectively remove unwanted objects from the frame. For example, a red spot in the background can be easily eliminated. Mark the area you want to hide, and then select the place from which you will take the donor background.

Removing scratches with the Stamp tool

A convenient tool will allow you to remove the glare that appeared during the process of converting a photo into digital form, lighten dark areas, increase sharpness or blur some fragments of the image. "Corrector". Select the area you want and adjust the color, toning, and sharpness settings.

The corrector can be very useful if in some place you were unable to carefully use the healing brush and noticeable unevenness appeared. Select this bad fragment and increase the blur value a little. The defect will not be so noticeable.

Slight blurring of a section of curtains after removing a large scratch

When restoring portraits, the option will allow a little more "Perfect Portrait". With its help, you can automatically make your skin smoother, your eyes more expressive, and your face brighter.

The “Face Lightening” style will smooth out remaining imperfections and make your skin tone more attractive.

• Improving the clarity of a photo

Over time, any paper photographs fade, and the technology of the beginning of the last century did not provide the same high detail as modern SLR cameras. And yet you can make the photo a little more expressive! In the "Enhancements" section there is a "Sharpness" tab, go there and increase the value of the parameter to the desired value. You will notice that the image has become more expressive.

Increase sharpness to make the photo clearer and more expressive

• Bringing back “antiqueness”

If it seems to you that during the processing process the photo has lost its unique retro flair, this can be corrected. Go to the "Effects" category. Here you will find vintage filters. With their help, you can restore the touch of antiquity and the former charm of photographs from the past.

The “Retro-2” effect will color the photo in a pleasant sepia

See how photo restoration is done in the program: before and after.

Are you satisfied with the result? Then save the resulting image to your computer. You can print it on paper to replace the damaged old one or publish it on social networks.

The memory is with you forever

Now not a single precious photograph that has come down to you from the last century will be lost. Young great-grandparents will smile from the family album, and time will no longer cause their faces to fade. Entrust the restoration of old photos to the PhotoMASTER editor!

You have a lot of time and are willing to sit for hours trying to improve the colors in your photo, sharpen it, or remove digital noise? This is a bold decision! For those who value time and want to perform all the above operations to improve a photo in one click, we suggest using online service correction of defects photo site. The site's simple and user-friendly interface will help you deal with the most common digital photo problems in less than a minute:

• faded colors or incorrect color rendering;
• digital noise in the photo;
• blur;
• red eye effect on photos of people.

By uploading your photo from your computer or via a link to the service page, you immediately receive a finished, improved photo, with color correction, noise reduction, and sharpening only in the necessary areas. At the same time, color saturation is adjusted and red eyes, if any, are removed.

More subtle manual photo correction settings

After the first photo processing, you will see a number of settings marked with check marks. They will allow you to select the necessary parameters more precisely (cancel or activate the function of removing noise, improving photo sharpness, correcting illumination, improving saturation, adjusting digital temperature).

Save enhanced photos. Free photo hosting. How to show an improved photo to friends

Improved photos can be saved to the Pho.to service (even without registration) or downloaded to your hard drive. A couple of clicks and you can share the link to the improved photo with your friends on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn or another social network. You can also easily post improved photos on your blog or website using embedding codes: HTML, BBcode or code for inserting photos in a flash shell.

Is your photo lacking clarity? This is very easy to fix in the PhotoMASTER program! Read the article and learn about three ways to improve the sharpness of a photo in this photo editor.

STEP 1. Upload a photo to work with

After launch, it will offer to add an image to work with. Click “Open Photo” and specify the path to the file. The photo will appear on the screen. In the menu on the right you can adjust the exposure, contrast, saturation of the photo, etc. Let's set the scale to 100% and move on to adjusting the sharpness.

STEP 2. Sharpen the entire image

In the " Sharpness» determine the strength of the effect. Increase the “Radius” if you want the outlines of objects to become more noticeable. Safe values ​​for the “Threshold” parameter are from 3 to 10. If it is equal to 0, then the changes will affect every pixel in the image, because of this, small defects will become more noticeable in the photo.

STEP 3. Add clarity to individual parts

Go to the menu "Retouch" > "". Adjust the brush size, transparency and feathering. Select a section of the photo to edit. Click on the "Sharpness" tab and adjust the settings. They are identical to those presented in the step above. Save the changes by clicking the “Apply” button.

STEP 4. Smoothly sharpen the photo

If you want to use sharpening to emphasize the top or bottom of the photo, then use the “” function, which is located in the “Retouching” section. Mark the area in the photo to which you want to apply the filter, and then select the optimal sharpness settings in the tab of the same name in the menu on the right.

Now you know how to improve the clarity of a photo in three ways: in simple ways in the PhotoMASTER program. But these are not all the functions of the application! Let's take a closer look at other software tools. Or you can do it right now directly from our website.

STEP 5. Change the color of any objects in the photo

If you need to change the color of a specific item in a photo, use the " " In chapter " Retouch" Simply select the desired element in the image, and then adjust its parameters in the menu on the right: hue, saturation, exposure and others. One moment - and the object in the photo will take on a different look!

STEP 6. Sign photos

You can add a text comment to the photo. This feature will be especially appreciated by photographers who want to sign their work. Open the section " " In the block on the right, enter text and click “ Add a caption" Customize the comment design to your liking: color, font, size and other parameters.

STEP 7. Process photos in 1 click!

You can apply stylish effects from the collection to the image. You will find all available options in the tab of the same name. With them, you can turn a modern photo into an atmospheric retro photo in one click! The catalog presents several variations of this effect. Try them all on!

Sound interesting? Try all the program's functions yourself. The download will take less than five minutes, after which you can install “PhotoMASTER” on your PC and improve any photos!

Out-of-focus photos are becoming increasingly popular for some reason, but without the much-loved filters like Instagram, they tend to be annoying. Let's say you tried to shoot a one-of-a-kind family video only to find that the image is blurry and shaky.

It turns out there are programs that can sharpen photos without messing around in Photoshop. While in most cases a blurry photo or video will never be made into a sharp, beautiful copy, these tools can be used to restore important details and bring back sharpness to make the footage look a little better.

While you can't expect to take a series of wildly out-of-focus photos and edit them to look like a magazine cover, you can go CSI-style with these apps and get amazing results.

Fully free application, which can be used as many times as you like, and is in many ways friendlier than Focus Magic. On the other hand, its operation is not very stable (the program froze a few times while I was testing it, especially when loading images that were too heavy), and the results that the program produces may vary.

There are several useful features in SmartDeblur - the presence of a zoom option, as well as the Fit To Window option. You can also compare the results with the original by clicking on “Show Original”. Preview is available for the entire image. The program contains a sample on which you can learn how to sharpen to read blurry text.

After testing the tool on my own photos, I found that it did not work as well as Focus Magic. But I managed to get good results with a picture containing text.

• Pros: Absolutely free, with a friendly interface, very useful for reading blurry text on photos.
• Minuses: Not very stable, doesn't work all that well with real photos (but try the app yourself to give your verdict).

Trying to recover lost parts will feel like you're working on CSI, but don't expect anything spectacular.

Focus Magic

Focus Magic is more than just a sharpening program. According to their website, they use "advanced forensic deconvolution technologies that literally remove blur like a hand." In theory, the app can handle out-of-focus images and blurry videos by restoring lost detail. But does it really work?

Focus Magic is far from an automatic tool. And this is a huge disadvantage, since the free trial version only allows you to perform 10 operations. After that, you will need to purchase a full license, which costs $45. After loading an image, you first need to decide whether you will focus, remove motion blur, defocus, or clear the image of debris. Then the long process of adjusting the parameters begins.

Since it is only possible to see the preview for a small area of ​​the image, it takes many attempts to achieve a good effect for the entire photo.

• Pros: It looks like a professional tool that can really achieve good results.
• Minuses: The work requires many attempts, but the user of the free version only has 10 of them. In addition, there is no option to change the scale (zoom), which is inconvenient.

You can use the app to bring sharpness back into your images if you have the patience and the money.

The application, unlike its competitors, has several features: very detailed instructions and self-sufficiency. By self-sufficiency I mean the program's ability to take on the heavy lifting of setup if you so choose. If you know what you're doing, you can access advanced settings, but this is not at all necessary.

After completing the training, you can begin processing. To do this, place the red square on the area with strong blur and click on the Process button. In most cases, that's all. If you are not satisfied with the results, you can move the square to another area and try again. The app does its job well and managed to turn some blurry photos into decent ones.

As you can see, the downside is the watermarks that are applied to all photos that you process using the free version of the application. If you really like the program and want to get rid of the watermark, the license will cost you $39.

• pros: Easy to use, good processing results, worse with text.
• Minuses: All processed photos are watermarked. The license costs $39.

conclusions

Believe it or not, I spent half a day researching this topic. After trying to sharpen a lot of blurry photos and videos, I realized one thing - it's better to shoot good material right away. But if for some reason Plan A doesn't work out, then the above apps can squeeze something out of your material, but it really depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Modern photographic equipment, unfortunately, is far from perfect. Even the most expensive camera can malfunction in an emergency. Something extraordinary happens, a person takes out a camera, presses the shutter, but in reality the picture turns out too blurry, and the lost moment will no longer be possible to return. In this case, a new software algorithm will help SmartDeblur.

Program SmartDeblur was developed by Vladimir Yuzhikov, who tried to solve the two most important issues, causing pictures to become blurry. The image may become poor due to poor focusing and due to camera movement when the shutter is open. Either of these two mistakes can greatly ruin photograph, however, Vladimir is confident that the low-quality one is not yet completely lost to history.

Author of the project SmartDeblur says that even in the case of a blurry photograph, all the necessary pixels are in the image, it’s just that each of these pixels turns out to be blurred in a special way in two-dimensional space. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to find a way to eliminate this blur and put each pixel in its rightful place. Miracles don't happen, algorithmSmartDeblur does not allow, as if by magic, to obtain a super-clear image of a professional level. However, the result is more than impressive.

The program has a simple and functional interface with a set of “sliders” for adjusting image parameters. Mastering the capabilities of the program occurs during its operation. Just upload the photo you want, move a few sliders and evaluate the proposed result. The utility boasts exceptional performance; all changes made by the user are displayed in real time.

Screenshots:

Program features:

Simple, intuitive interface
High speed. Processing an image of 2048*1500 pixels in size takes about 300 ms in Preview mode (when the settings sliders are moved) and 1.5 seconds in Finish mode (when the settings sliders are released).
Selection of parameters in Real-time mode. There is no need to press Preview buttons, everything is done automatically, you just need to move the distortion settings sliders
All processing is carried out for the image in full resolution. Those. There is no small preview window or Apply buttons.
Supports restoration of blurry and out of focus images
Ability to customize the PSF view

Test results:

One of the photos from the photo session that was initially rejected

After processing in the program SmartDeblur Pro 2.3

OS: Windows XP/7/8
Interface language: Russian
Medicine: No need
Size: 22 MB

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