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How to remove blur spot from photo

Tuesday, 03 June 2008

Had not been posting for weeks due to studies commitment and yeah I kinda got lazy on my fingers too... :P

I was just about to take a bite off my chinese dumpling this evening, when I chanced upon this photo I shot with my gf at Niagara Falls, Canada last year. Arggh, there was this irritating water spot blur on the photo as my lens was wet from the mist rising from the falls. Suddenly, I thought, why didnt I try to solve this problem earlier on?

I noticed that the area of blur was only on the tower and I thought maybe I could just copy and paste another tower photo on it to cover the blur? Sound doable... Immediately, I look through my other photos in the album and I got one photo that could save the day. Though, the second photo also have a water spot blur, but the tower was clear and that is enough for me.

A closer look at the problem area first, before we proceed. Please also note that the concept is fairly simple, paste an okay area from other photo to the same problematic area in the target photo. Basically, to solve this kind of problem, you need at least another photo with roughly the same subjects captured at the same exposure, depth of field and angle.

Step 1: First, just simply open the second photo in Photoshop and use the select tool. Explore the Feather Setting to select the section of photo you wished to copy so you can get a faded selection. In this case, I used 50px setting and I carefully select the portion of the tower out, to fit onto the exact area in the problem photo.

Step 2: Paste the selection over to the problem photo. Of course, most of the time, the selection will not fit exactly onto the area. There will still be some difference in the size and angle of the subjects. You will also appreciate why the feather setting was used in Step 1. Do your best to align both photos together to achieve maximum compatability. For this case, I used the shape of the house as a guideline and make sure both outlines are in line with each other.

Step 3: Now you just need to get rid of those extra images that will never be in line with the subjects in problem photo.Like the lamppost below, no matter how I tried to align, the lamppost will go in tune with the original lamppost. So I have to use the "Eraser tool". With the focus on the pasted area, select a small brush size with 100% opacity, carefully delete off the extra areas. If not, the image will become "double visioned", which is okay if you are in the creativity line....

Now when everything is done, save your final product as another file to preserve the original in case you do not like the edited photo. You can do a bit of edge sharpening, depending on situations. You can see my edited photo below. Please remember this don't always work, you need to have two roughly same images...