JPG distortion, tiling, and artifacts can ruin an otherwise great
image. While no technique can truly restore and image, here’s a How-to
Geek tip on how to remove and repair JPG distortion and artifacts in a
few easy steps.
Nothing shy of a miracle can recover the image data lost when an
image is saved in a lossy format like JPG. But with some clever trickery
and a little bit of Photoshop magic, you can fix the worst parts of
your image and get a better result in almost no time at all. GIMP users,
follow along, as this Photoshop howto is GIMP friendly. Keep reading to
see how you can finally restore your images!
Fixing JPG Artifacts With Photoshop
JPG is a pretty amazing format, all things considered. But the lossy
nature of the filetype can be an ugly mess. Let’s take a closer look at
this image.
Without a lot of zoom, we can see a big problem with our image data.
Tiling is obvious, and we can see some definite artifacts popping up in
the whites of the eye. Let’s take some steps to reduce all of that ugly.
It can be a good habit to make a copy of your background image before
making any changes, but in this case, it’s mandatory. Right click your
background layer and select “Duplicate Layer.”
On your new duplicated layer, Navigate to Filter > Blur > Smart Blur.
These settings worked fairly well for this level of JPG distortion
and tiling. If you have more, you can set your “Radius” and “Threshold”
to higher settings. Quality settings should be set to “High,” although
any setting will work just fine.
Depending on your success with the filter, you may decide to stop
here. But it wouldn’t be very geeky of us to stop after just showing you
how to use the smart blur filter. Keep reading and we’ll transform this
filtered image into a much better final result.
Turning A Smart Blur Into An Image Without Artifacts
Our image clearly has some issues, even with the smart blur. We’ve
lost detail and we’re getting some odd pixelation around some of the
edges. We have sucessfully blotted out our tiling and distortion, but
let’s see if we can’t get the best of both worlds from this image with a
little bit of Photoshop geekery.
Create a layer mask on your Smart Blur layer by Alt + Clicking on the 
button in the layers panel. This will mask out all of this topmost layer revealing the original problematic JPG again.
Grab the brush tool and make sure you fill your 
Foreground color with white. Your brush should be set to a very soft
hardness setting (0% shown above, is fine) with the size set appropriate
to the size of your image. Work larger if you’re using a larger image,
and smaller if you’re working with a smaller sized image.
Paint white into the image mask in the parts that you want to become
smoother and less full of artifacts. Be careful around edges and don’t
be afraid to undo and redo your work. Painting with black will hide your
topmost layer, while white will make the Smart Blur layer reappear.
Selectively masking the Smart Blur layer will allow you to retain the
critical details of the layer with JPG distortion, while eliminating or
minimizing the artifacts and tiling.
Selectively changing your brush Opacity in the top options bar can
also be helpful. Sometimes leaving some of the detail from the JPG layer
can keep some of the texture, while minimizing the gross parts.
Without too much effort put into painting, we can see that our image
is beginning to look much improved, despite artifacts and low pixel
depth. Let’s look at how our mask looks, just to be clear.
At this point, we’ve only allowed our Smart blur to appear on the
parts in our face. Here’s how the layer mask looks by itself. The white
parts represent where we’ve painted with—you guessed it—our white brush.
Here’s our overlay, with the red parts representing where the Smart
Blur layer is blocked out. Hopefully this makes it clear what you need
to be doing with your paintbrush.
Again, it is impossible to recreate the image once it’s been saved in
a lossy format, but clever Photoshop trickery can almost always improve
it.
Smooth Out Artifacts, But Retain Detail
When you have skies or fields of color, you’ll find that the JPG
format will create horrible distortions and textures that clearly
weren’t present in the original photograph. Let’s look at one final
example to show the usefulness of this trick.
This trick can be very helpful when you have these fields of open
color combined with detail (such as this tree), because you can combine
the best of both worlds.
Even at this horrendously small resolution, we can combine our smart
blur layer with the detail in original JPG. The tree still looks like a
tree, and the sky is smooth and artifact free.
And in no time at all, our distortions are cleared up while retaining detail in our foreground object.
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You must have tried a lot of photo editing
tools like Adobe Photoshop, Picasa and much more to alter or modify a
particular image. But in the case if you are running out of any such
tools , installed in your computer , then I have a great online
application that will fulfill your needs. Picnik is a online photo editing tool that is free from hazards like installing in the computer or signing up etc.
Also read: Turn Black & White Images in Color Images automatically.
Recently
Google has taken over Picnik and already it has become a contender to
Yahoo’s Flickr. Despite of having applications like Picasa, Google was
very keen to acquire Picnik because it is a online platform to provide
the same facilities like the other tools and have a interface easy to
use.
Features:
- Picnik is a awesome online image
editing tool where you can edit your image without any registration or
signing up. With a single click any image can be uploaded from your
hard drive and can be edited with some basic editing tools. To edit a
image just go to Picnik and click on “Get started now”, then click on “Upload photos” to upload photos in Picnik.
- You
can easily rotate, crop, re size your image. You can also set the
exposure, colors and sharpness in your image according to your choice.
After every editing action you can fine tune your result with the help
of “Advance” option.
- Another attractive feature of Picnik is you can justify your editing effects with the original image using the “Undo” and “Redo” tab.
- In “Rotate” option you can flip your image vertically or horizontally in a single click.
Special things in Picnik:
- The most cool application in Picnik is “Auto fix”. With this tool you can modify a poor image in a single click. Just upload the image and click “Auto fix”.
- You can easily remove the red eye defect(caused by the flash of camera) using Picnik. Upload the image and click on “Red-Eye”. Press the “Human” option and click the center of the each eye to fix the red eye defect.
- Edit image directly from Flickr, Picasa web album, Facebook, Photobucket, Myspace, or Web search and more. Click on “Library”
tab and connect your Facebook or any other account. Therefore collage
and share your picture with friends and family and also print your
edited image.
- To use Picnik more with more reliability in your browser, you can add your browser extension for Picnik like Picnik Internet Explorer Extension and more.
Though
the Picnik is a free utility, it has some premium package. If you are a
premium package holder then you can get some more extra facility and
fullscrean edit opportunity. If you are a professonal image editor or
love to play with images then Picnik will not disappoint you!
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Today the technology is very advanced and
every thing is well defined and good looking.Now we can not think about
the black&white pictures because the modern technology has made the
world colored and we can capture the original,colored view in our photos
or computer.
Tip: Edit Images Online By Picnik: Alternative of Photoshop.
But
long time ago there was no option to take a colored picture then the
only option was to make a black&white picture.But we can still
convert the black&white pictures in color picture by
Photoshop.Photoshop is an awesome application released by Adobe
to edit the picture.You can perform various type of editing like color
editing,resizing the image,cloning etc.But if you are not familiar with
Adobe Photoshop then it is bit tough to edit any picture in the
Photoshop.
There
are numbers of software to change a colored photo in black&white
photo.But when the reverse is in roll then you should have some problem
to search for such software that does the reverse job.
Not anymore.Black Magic is a free utility that allows you to turn a black&white photo into colored photo automatically.
Installation and usage scenario
No
installation is needed.After extracting the compressed file,just click
on the application icon and then it will automatically open the
application environment.
Now
press the “Load image” button and select the black&white image that
you want to colorize.Adjust the colors and then press the “Auto
Finish” button.Now your black&white picture will be automatically
converted into colored image.
Any suggestions or questions are always welcome.
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If you are a huge internet user and busy in
different projects then you would feel the need of uploading a snap shot
and share it with any one (read also 6 useful Services to Upload and Share Large Files over Network).
You
may feel the absence of some fast snapshot sharing tool so that you may
describe your problem to you friend by a pictorial way. Generally it is
not easy to share any screen shot through internet. But ScreenSnapr
(now the website is unavailable) is a light weight tool that solves
your problem.
You can take any screen shot using a pre defined
short cut key (by default ctrl+1). It automatically upload the screen
shot at http://screensnapr.com/ and automatically using their own url
shortening service, it copies the url of your uploaded screen shot in
the clipboard.
An overlook on Screen Snipr
- ScreenSnapr is a free windows platform based tool.
- ScreenSnapr is a light-weight software (just 151 KB).
- Easy to upload any part of the window or the total window.
- It just take two steps to upload the screen shot of your desired area.
- Press the shortcut key (by default ctrl+1) and select the area of which the screen shot you want to upload and share .
- Automatically it shorten the url and is copied to your clipboard.
Procedure
- Download ScreenSnapr (now the download link is unavailable).
- Install it.You need to extract the zip file.
- Now press “ctrl+1”
- Select the area you want to upload and share.
- Now the short url will be generated automatically.And will be copied in your clipboard.
- Paste the url where you want.
Here is the screen shot of my post
Now
you are ready to upload and share any screen shot of your windows.I
think this may help you to discuss any problem or any descriptive topic.
Leave your feed back in the comment section.
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