Motion blur correction
 

I spent a summer surveying in the Kenai Pennisula of Alaska. Beautiful grueling work. Near the end of the season by boss and I were at a great site and I asked him to get a shot of me with my little digital Pentax. Told him it was impossible to take a bad shot. Wrong! There was some wobble during the shot which induced blur. I figured this out too late to give it a second try.

So I have this great and sentimental image, but it's flawed. Do any of you know of motion correction service or software?

Thanks in advance.

Sorry, no such thing really.

You can apply an unsharp mask in various photo editing programs but all that does is sharpen the individual pixels - so you just end up with a bunch of sharp pixels of a still blurred image.

Focus Magic
 

http://www.focusmagic.com/ does the job. It has one tool for getting rid of motion blur, and another for fixing focus errors. You can try it for free on a few images.

There's a free tool called unshake: http://www.hamangia.freeserve.co.uk/
whose web page has a good explanation of the theory:
http://www.hamangia.freeserve.co.uk/how/index.html

Just an FYI but I have tried that filter and never had any luck.

The resulting images were full of artifacts and over-sharpened. I am sure it can recover a certain amount of detail like numbers and letters but on human faces the results had a 'phony' look to me.

IMO you can achieve pretty much the same results with Photoshop's unsharp mask.

YMMV, but if you like the results I guess that's all that matters.

I used a demo version of Focus Magic and it pulled a little bit of detail out when the motion was very linear and the image not too complicated. It won't work magic - the improvement was small and I didn't buy the software -but it's free to try on a small number of images to see what you think.

There's a lot of research in motion blur that happens in the medical imaging field (MRI etc). Interesting that it hasn't made it to us mere mortals in the consumer ranks. I guess there's a business opportunity in that.

I listened to a mathematician carry on about her work in the initial research on satellite image correction. She conveyed it was mind-numbing but successful. That stuck with me.

Thanks for all the input.