Rant: Tried to fix a blurry shot of my dog and made it worse with too much sharpening

I was at the park last Saturday trying to get a photo of my golden retriever catching a frisbee. The shot came out shaky because I was panning with him running sideways. I brought it into a free editing app and cranked the sharpening slider up to like 80 percent thinking that would fix it. Instead the whole image turned into a crunchy mess with weird halos around his fur and the grass looking like gravel. So now I'm stuck between leaving it blurry but natural or oversharpened and ugly. Has anyone else dealt with this where you just can't find a middle ground between soft and artificial looking?

2 comments

2 Comments

amymiller9d ago

Try a selective approach instead of sharpening the whole thing at once. Most free editors let you use a brush or mask to apply sharpening only to the dog's face and body while leaving the background alone. The grass and halos usually happen because you're sharpening every single pixel equally, but the blurry motion is only really noticeable on the dog himself.

ray6489d ago

Mild pushback on selective sharpening - I've tried that route and it still looks weird when the dog's head is sharp but the body is blurry from motion. The whole dog was moving sideways through the frame so you'd need to mask like 50 individual frames of fur and tail every time he shifts. Now you've got a dog with a sharp face but a blurry body and that looks even more unnatural to me than just leaving it soft. Sometimes a motion blurry photo is just a motion blurry photo and no amount of smart masking changes the physics of the camera. Plus grass halos happen even with selective sharpening if the original blur was bad enough. You might be better off just accepting the blur and calling it an artistic action shot.