Fix Motion Blur When the Smear Is Short

Name the direction before you spend a credit

Hold the picture at arm’s length and find the streak. A handshake smear runs the same way across the whole frame: lights become dashes, a sign becomes a comb. A subject that moved while the camera stayed still is different. The background is sharp and the person is dragged. Unblur can sometimes pull a short camera smear back toward an edge. It cannot put a runner’s foot back into one place when the exposure painted a foot in five places.

If you can read the direction in a single glance, the smear is already long. Stop. A model that guesses a blur kernel will often pick a length the photograph did not have, and the result is a double edge: the true edge and a ghost a few pixels away. That ghost looks like sharpness until you print it. The slider is how you see it. If the letters of a sign split into parallel copies, keep the camera original.

Night streets are the hostile case because the lights are the streak and the denoise temptation is separate. Denoise the colored speckle in the shadows if that is the veil, and do not expect the headlight dashes to become round lamps. Read the night page when the grain is the problem and this page when the dash is the problem. Stacking both on the first try hides which one moved the pixels.

What unblur will and will not do

Unblur costs one credit and is on the free tool. There is no kernel-length slider. One pass, then the comparison. A second pass usually traces the ghost and makes it darker. If the first result is a double edge, the honest file is the one you uploaded. A failed job, a timeout, or a file we cannot decode returns the credit. A finished file you simply wish were sharper does not.

Out-of-focus blur has no direction. The catchlight is a disk, the background was meant to be soft, and the subject is woolly in every direction at once. That is the out-of-focus page. Running a motion tool on bokeh tries to invent edges in a blur the lens chose. Leave the background soft. If the subject is the woolly part and there is no streak, unblur is still the mode, but you should not describe it as motion.

Size is a later question. A 2× enlarge of a smeared file prints the streak larger. Prove the unblur on the original dimensions first. The free download of 3,200 px is enough to judge an 8×10. It is not a reason to upscale before you have accepted the edge. 4× is Pro, two credits, and it is the wrong purchase if the 1× result already ghosted.

A reception, a street, a child who would not hold still

Wedding receptions combine flash, shake, and a moving couple. The flash frame is often sharp and ugly. The ambient frame is often smeared and true. Repair the ambient one only if the smear is short, and read the wedding page before you batch the whole card. One honest frame is the test. Twelve copies of a ghost are a month of credits.

A child on a swing is a moving subject. The ropes may be sharp and the face dragged, or the reverse if you panned. Panning blur on the background is sometimes the picture. Removing it invents a static scene that was not the exposure. Say which blur you meant to keep before you upload.

Commercial use is allowed when you have the rights, including on the free tool. Free pages show ads. The files are deleted after 24 hours. HEIC from a phone must be exported to JPEG, PNG, WebP, or AVIF first. Paying does not add a decoder. The API can run the same unblur during those 24 hours, and it cannot fetch the file the next day.

A worked frame

A dusk street frame shows every lamp as a dash about eight pixels long, all in the same direction, and the building edges smear the same way. That is short camera shake, not a runner. Unblur once. If each lamp becomes two disks, the kernel was longer than the photograph and the ghost is the failure. Keep the smeared original. If the lamps tighten and the sign stays one set of letters, the credit was earned. Do not then 4× the frame to make the street a poster. Prove the edge at the original size. A second case on the same card, a dancer whose hand occupies five positions while the band is sharp, is not this repair. Leave that frame. Denoise only if the shadows are also speckled, and only before the unblur, so you can see the streak you are judging. The free download cap does not change a ghost into a hit. Pro's full file would only print the ghost larger.