Save a blurred image - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends how are you doing it is time for some more secret sauce and today I will show you how to save a blurry image my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer and I want to thank of my patrons who support me and make these videos possible also before we get started because of corona time and social isolation I want to give you something special so starting next Tuesday which is the 31st March I will release a bundle with all of my pro packs 75% reduced and the pro pack for this month is even included completely free alright and now for the announcements let's look at these pictures you can see here on the left side it's me and as sharp on the right side is my cat Palooza and that's blurry so how can we save that picture well we want to apply adjustments to make the picture sharp but only on the cat face so I will apply them first to all of the image I want to start with the classic unsharpened mask so let's go down here to life filters and then to unsharp mask here and I'm going to set the radius to 2 pixels and then the factor let's see how high we can go before it starts to look bad don't look at the left side just look at the cat's face and we will fix the rest later so that looks pretty good ok so the next thing I want to do is to apply a curve like that because we want to have more contrast in the image because contrast also can look like a sharper image you can see that's pretty good let's bring this down a little bit you can see the face already appears a lot sharper than before let's see there is good ok let's apply another adjustment in this case another life filter for clarity and we want to have the clarity on its own so it's not applied to the curves adjustment make sure it's applied to the picture because otherwise you won't see much of an effect so how far can we go here mmm let's see a little bit let's go like that that looks pretty good okay do we need something else we can also try the adjustment for brightness and contrast basically the same as curves but we can still play around with that let's see so that seems pretty good okay good so now the trick is because this looks pretty extreme as you can tell we will right click and then we want to select merge visible so this is calculating a version of all these kind of adjustments on its extra layer and then we turn off all of the other adjustments that we have made so far and you can see here the before and after so this has changed quite a bit so that's pretty good now we want to do next is to apply a mask layer to this and then select the mask layer and go to layer invert so it's a negative mask isn't applied to anything at all and the next thing we are going to do is to take a brush and as you can see the mask right now is black so we want to set the color of our brush to white and then we can paint in our sharpness and now you can be very selective about this so you can say let's paint it only on the parts where I actually need the details because if you have too much of it it could look a little bit extreme so we want to basically only go with the face here I will make my brush a little bit bigger maybe reduce the opacity to let's say 50% there we go so this gives me multiple attempts to layer up my opacity and you can see here I can simply paint this onto the cat face and not onto anything else in the pic and this lets the cat face appear a lot sharper and a lot more detailed than it actually is it's kind of tricking our eyes so that's pretty nice maybe went a little bit too far over here on the face so you can switch over to the color black maybe make the brush a little bit smaller again like that you can see I can paint this out on the face good like that of course if you want you can also apply sharpness and detail to the rest of the picture so maybe apply a little bit of that let's go with let's say 20% and paint that also onto my face because the detailed look pretty nice so let's make my face also a little bit sharper and the beard down here we have some nice detail there we go okay so now if you compare this this is the after and this is the before you can see that we improve the picture quite a bit and by the way this is a saving of a picture so you can maybe print it but it's not thought for like printing quality it's more like if you want to share it online and there the effect is way good enough to share it on Facebook or Instagram stuff like that so if we make it small and I turn it on and off again you can see that we get a lot more detail and the face actually looks really sharp now while before it's kind of blurry so that's a pretty cool effect and because we only applied it partially the effect is even more effective basically I hope you enjoyed this video leave a like if you do and if you subscribe to my channel hit a little Bell button so you get notified when I upload a next video and also look out for all of my pro pecks together in one bundle for 75% off which is a special deal to give something back to the community during the corona time thank you very much and see you soon bye