If you are not sure whether the image has motion blur, out-of-focus blur, or low resolution, start with the guide to identifying and fixing blurry photos.
Here we have three children standing with their bikes and tennis racquets in front of Dad's gleaming new car. It looks blurred, so the first thing is to zoom into the image and look for point sources, which become streaks of light for motion blur or circles for out-of-focus blur.
The image has a whole lot of “double point sources” at 45 degrees and a few pixels apart, as shown by the arrows. This is another type of motion blur, even though it looks like some sort of double exposure. The camera was travelling more slowly at the two ends of the blur. This can happen if the photographer jerks the camera as the shutter release is pressed.
Let's suppose the unthinkable happens and there is not a single point source in the image — there are no shiny little dots to help us diagnose the type of blur. This can happen, so we need to look at edges in various directions to determine the motion-blur direction.
The parts of the tennis racket indicated by the yellow arrows are much sharper and narrower than those indicated by the blue arrows. The yellow-arrow edges are parallel to the motion, while the blue-arrow edges are at right angles to it. If edges are blurred by the same amount in all directions, then the image has out-of-focus blur.
By lining up the blur-direction indicator in Focus Magic with the blur in the image, we get a direction of about 130 degrees. The blur distance can normally be found by trial and error. Slowly increase the blur distance until the streaks — or double dots in this case — become one dot.
The image will be repaired as shown here.
If you want to experiment, you can download the whole image here.
For a video presentation of this tutorial, watch the Repair Motion Blur video tutorial.
