How to fix and sharpen blurry photos.
To achieve a product that looks as stunning as the real thing, use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to deblur your images and bring out the brilliant details.
One of the great challenges in photography is capturing what your eyes see with tools that aren’t your eyes. With the wrong camera settings and editing, what you may see as a sweeping landscape, full of depth, light and color, may instead come across as a blurry, unfocused expanse of shapes.
Follow these tips to compose and edit images that are as stunning as what you saw through the camera.
Camera settings to fix blurry photos.
- Focus: An obvious way to take clear photos is to make sure your camera is in focus. Focus on the correct part of the composition, stand far enough away from your subject and take time to ensure the image clear before shooting. Hold your camera steady or use a tripod to ensure stability.
- Shutter Speed and Aperture: There’s a sweet spot to navigate between shutter speed (how fast your camera takes a photo) and aperture (how shallow your depth of field is). The faster the shutter speed, the wider you need to make your aperture. But the wider your aperture, the bigger challenge it can be to focus. A good rule is to choose a shutter speed with a denominator larger than your lens’ focal length. For example, if you’re using a 200mm lens, shoot at 1/250 of a second or faster.
- ISO settings: ISO measures how sensitive your camera is to light. Higher ISO means your sensor is more sensitive to light and you can use your camera in darker situations — higher settings also create “noisier” images. Keep your ISO as low as possible for hyper-focused photos.
How to fix blurry photos using your camera settings.
Tweaking your camera settings to take sharp photos will greatly help the editing process. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom helps you take those images to the next level with more settings and tools to deblur, refine and focus.
- Detail panel: Find the detail panel in the “develop” module and choose what you’d like to deblur. Zoom in on your image to make sure you’re sharpening in the exact right places.
- Sharpening settings: Depending on the type of image you’re working on, you may want more or less sharpening. A landscape image, for instance, can tolerate more sharpening than a portrait close-up. Use the “amount” slider to play around with how much sharpening is right for your image and composition.
- Radius and detail slider: The radius feature indicates how large the details are as you deblur your image — smaller is better for landscapes, and larger is better for portraits or close-ups. After you’ve sharpened your image, use the detail slider to emphasize edges.
Explore what more you can do with Lightroom to create heightened and compelling photographs.