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In 2004 my grandpa showed me how he un-blurred a photo of his brother's ship, and I still use his trick
Back around 2004 my grandpa sat me down at his kitchen table in Dayton with a stack of old family photos and one of them was a total mess, just a grey smear where my great uncle's Navy ship should be. I was maybe 12 and I told him it was gone, but he laughed and pulled out a magnifying glass and a cheap flatbed scanner he got at a garage sale. He scanned that photo at 1200 dpi, way higher than the photo deserved, then in some old program he just nudged the contrast slider back and forth until the shape of the hull came out of the fog. He told me "the info is in there, you just have to stop yelling at it," which I didn't get at the time but I do now. Last week I ran a blurry pic of my neighbor's lost dog through that same basic move, high res scan then small contrast tweaks, and you could finally see the tag on the collar. It took me about 20 minutes and I felt like I was 12 again at that table. Does anyone else still do the slow contrast crawl on old scans, or is everyone just feeding stuff into AI sharpeners now?
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reese_bell25d ago
That contrast trick just kills the pic more than AI ever could.
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