My uncle in Spokane gave me one tip for cleaning up blurry pics and it actually worked

Christopher Martinez · 2026-09-23T22:35:05.008147+00:00

A few years ago my uncle in Spokane who used to do crime scene photography gave me a tip for dealing with really grainy shots. He said to duplicate the layer in whatever free editor you have, set the copy to about 40 percent opacity, then nudge it a single pixel to the right and down. I tried it on a shot of a street sign I could not read from a moving car and the letters got sharp enough to make out in about 2 minutes. The trick is you have to use tiny moves, because moving it 3 or 4 pixels just smears everything into a mess. I have used it on maybe 15 pictures since then and it works on most of them, though it does nothing for straight up out of focus shots. Has anyone tried stacking two nearly identical frames from burst mode instead, and does that beat the offset trick?

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My uncle in Spokane gave me one tip for cleaning up blurry pics and it actually worked | Blurry Photo Forensics - Topic Shares