My friend Paula lost all of her high school photos in a fire. Last week a friend posted a high school photo of her on her Facebook page. It is a very blurry photo that appears to have been copied from a high school yearbook.

This is the “original photo” as it was posted to Paula’s Facebook page.

I’ve been testing Topaz Gigapixel AI software which is supposed to enlarge and sharpen old, blurry photos. I asked Paula for permission to test the software on her photo and she said yes.

I ran the blurry photo through Topaz to sharpen it. Then I used Photoshop to remove the greenish color cast to restore the original B&W look of a yearbook photo.

There is some kind of strange anomaly in the bottom 20% or so of the original photo. The hair doesn’t look quite right and it does not line up. When Topaz enlarged and sharpened the photo, it restored the top 80% of the image, and did not restore the bottom 20%. You can just about draw a slightly angled line across the bottom of the image between the sharpened and unsharpened part.

I cropped off the unsharpend part of the image.

There is some blotchiness in the original photo that comes through in the Topaz correction. That can be fixed in Photoshop, but I wanted you to see what Topax did to the photo without making any additional changes, other than remove the color cast.

I have tested Topaz Sharpen AI and Topaz Gigapixel AI. Needless to say, I highly recommend Topaz software if you are trying to rescue old family photos.