Out of focus photo

[capezio]

Hi I hope someone can give me some help please

I have a job to create a series of 4 A4 posters for a charity running 4 fundraising events.

Each one is an outdoor activity, walks, abseil, and family bike ride. I have been supplied with one great abseil photo, one ok, one bad London Bridge and a shocking out of focus bike ride from a previous event.

My posters are relying on typographic design with the photos at the bottom quite heavily cropped and an irregular shape.

My question is with the out of focus one I thought that by making it more blurred by using filters in photoshop and then adding a texture it would look better than it being out of focus. So far I have tried a median blur and a
canvas texture. Is there anything else I can try?

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

["Technical" Terry]

Radial blur with zoom setting.

[capezio]

thanks for that TT.

Great idea and I tried it (never having used it before) unfortunately I now see what the effect does and it doesn't suit the pic which is of people off their bikes posing for the photo <sigh> if they were riding it would have been great.

thanks any way, any more suggestions?

[mac.FINN]

Gaussian blur.

[emmerse]

^^^ do that, and maybe Image -> Adjust -> Hue/Saturation -> Colorize to make it a single color complimentary to the rest of the design.

[capezio]

thanks for all your suggestions.
Don't really know how I arrived at the solution but the client is happy with the finished effect. At least now it looks like an effect and not a bad photo.

[Ned]

Have you tried sharpening it with a highpass filter? Duplicate the layer, set the blending mode to Soft Light, then apply Filter => Other => High Pass.

[fredrich]

If the photo is out of focus, I'd go for the way you went for it, make it even more blurry/artistic, because if the photo is screwed in the first place you can't just "photoshop" it in focus.