How to unblur a photo

01Four kinds of blur

Motion blur comes from the camera or the subject moving while the shutter was open, and it smears detail along a direction. Focus blur comes from the lens being focused somewhere other than your subject, spreading every point into a small disc. Resolution blur is not really blur at all — the detail was never captured, because the image is 320 pixels wide. Compression blur is detail that was captured and then discarded by an aggressive JPEG or a messaging app.

Compression and resolution problems respond best, because the underlying structure is still present in degraded form. Mild motion and focus blur respond reasonably well. Severe motion blur, where a face has smeared across forty pixels, is closer to invention than recovery, and you should treat whatever comes back with suspicion.

02Why so many enhancers make skin look like plastic

The quickest way to make an image look sharper is to remove everything resembling noise and then raise local contrast. Skin texture — pores, fine hairs, the slight irregularity of a real face — sits in the same frequency range as sensor noise. A model tuned to score well on sharpness learns to delete both, and the result is the waxy, airbrushed face that makes an enhanced portrait obvious at a glance.

The alternative is to rebuild texture rather than strip it. Pixelyft's Enhance is built around that goal: it upscales to high resolution while reconstructing pores, fibres, hair and film grain, and it holds identity in place so that face count, moles, freckles and expression survive the pass.

03Give the model the best input you can

Preparation costs a minute and changes the outcome more than any setting does:

• Start from the original file, not a screenshot of it or a re-download from a chat app
• Do not sharpen, denoise or upscale it yourself first — the model does better on untouched degradation
• Crop to the subject before processing if the frame is mostly empty, so the resolution goes where you care
• Keep it under 10 MB; JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC all work, so an iPhone photo needs no conversion

04What to expect, and what it costs

A good enhance recovers texture and edge definition that still reads as real at full size — fabric weave, individual hair strands, the grain of wood. It does not add information that was never recorded. If a licence plate is six pixels wide, no tool can tell you the number, and any tool that shows you one is inventing it.

New accounts get one free enhance, so you can check the result on your own file first. After that, Pro is €19.99 a month with a rolling credit allowance, or you can buy a one-time pack of 150 images for €4.99 with no subscription and no renewal. Uploads travel over an encrypted connection, stay private to your account, and are never used to train models.