Making the Best of a Blurry Photo!

Written & Designed By Denna de Motta - Member of the Creative Memories Design Team

I know many people who won’t keep a blurry photo, but I am not in that number. I have been laughed at for some of the crazy blurry photos I’ve kept!! Needless to say, they are usually photos of my children! Sometimes I just don’t have the heart to delete (or throw out) a less-than-perfectly-focused photo. Now that I have Memory Manager 3.0 and Storybook Creator 3.0, I have been able to salvage many photos that I wouldn’t have used before.

When I saw this cute shot of my daughter and her friend I was so disappointed to see it wasn’t in perfect focus! But I’m not deleting it, it’s way too precious!!

So this is what I did:

In Memory Manager I opened the photo and went to the Selection tab in the tool bar and then clicked on Lasso. With Lasso on, you click around the area you want to ‘lasso’ or select. I went around the girls, careful to not follow their outlines exactly, but to leave a little space around them (that helps with the Edge Blending feature). With the girls lassoed, next I selected Sharpen under the Focus ribbon and sharpened the girls who are “inside the selected area”, and just moved the ‘Edge blending’ slider a bit then clicked Accept. I also went to ‘Light’ to highlight them a bit more by playing with the sliders, mostly the Highlight slider and the Contrast slider.

Next I wanted to blur the background, so I went to Soft Focus which is under Focus>Soften and selected “outside the selected area” to make the background soft and fuzzy. I moved the Blur slider almost completely to the right. It’s necessary to play with the Edge Blending slider to get a seamless transition from the blurry to the in-focus parts of the photo. I moved it almost to the middle. Click Accept then go to Black and White under the Color & Light ribbon and make the area “outside the selected area” B&W and click Accept. Now go and remove the dashed lines of the selected area by clicking Deselect, which is right beside Lasso.

Click Lasso again and this time lasso the flowers, so they are the selected element. In order to change the color of the girls, go to Color & Light and click on Hue and Saturation. Select “outside the selected area” and move the Saturation slider almost all the way to the left, so the girls’ faces are just lightly tinted. Change the Edge blending slider and the Blending slider just a bit. I also gave the flowers another shot of “Sharpen”!! So in the end the flowers are bright, the girls just tinted and the background blurry and B&W.

There you go, one way to spruce up a slightly blurry photo!!

(Another way is to put the whole photo into Soft Focus!)

The digital elements I used on my example page are from the following digital kits:

Wish Digital Kit; Valentine Digital Embellishments; Black and White Digital Power Palette; Celebration Digital Alpha and the font I used was Complete in Him.