Hi folks,

I get photos from a smartphone of horses to put on a website... they're pretty poor quality, especially those taken in a stall of newborn foals - and I'm not that experienced in adjusting images so I wind up just shotgunning with curves, levels, contrast/brightness, etc. I have no way to get a better quality initial image - I'm not the one taking the photos. If there is anything I could suggest to the person taking the photos I can do that - but suspect the limitation is the camera phone being used.

I would REALLY appreciate suggestions for the best way to improve these photos.

I particularly would like to be able to get rid of the pixilated edges, the sort of overcast or lack of contrast/highlights, the blurry/unfocused look (maybe created by the pixilation?) - or anything else folks can suggest to make the image look more realistic/better.

Thanks in advance for suggestions!

I'm not a photographer, but I would suggest that the camera/phone being used be set to the best possible image it can produce.

Either the camera phone is an old and crummy one, or your friend needs to change the settings and save files in higher resolution. Nevertheless, one has to work with what's available. Here's what I did:

1. Upsize the image. In GIMP, select Image>Scale and resize the image by 400% using Sinc (Lanczos3) interpolation method.

2. Sharpen it without making the grainy fine details worse. I used G'MIC>Details>Sharpen [octave sharpening] with a Threshold of 12 and the other values at default.


If you wanted to make this a nice-looking picture to hang on the wall, experiment with artistic filters. Many a poor-quality photo can be made into an attractive "painting."

Thank you Acmespace. Where is the G'MIC>Details>Sharpen? Or is it a plugin/script that I need to find and download? I wasn't able to find it in my menus but could have overlooked it?

I had found info on a script called warp-sharpening, which is supposed to primarily find and sharpen edges while minimizing noise... installed it but am getting a couple of errors on it. Talking over email with the creator now, he sent a newer version but it still needs a bit more fixing apparently.

About the camera/phone...

Thanks also to Wallace for his reply. I will have to ask the owner what phone he's got and look up settings on it and how to change them if that's even possible... he's not the type to be too inclined to read operators manuals! ;0)

used modLCS and G'MIC upscale 4x

You can download the G'MIC plugin at: http://gmic.eu/gimp.shtml

It is well worth the effort to install. However, if you need to edit the photos before you have time to install more software, look in the GIMP Filters>Enhance menu and try some of the sharpening methods there.

Thanks Acmespace for the link! Thanks also Wallace for the screengrabs, those will help!

I've downloaded G'mic, will install tomorrow.

Dinasset, thanks, that looks useful too - is the modLCS another plugin or script? Do you have a link for where I get it?

Likely a key issue: I found out the cameraphone apparently takes HUGE photos, with very large file size. I'm not sure what that means exactly yet and have asked for more details. But he's been really scaling them down to send over email. If they're so large that they have to be scaled to email (or maybe I'll have him upload to photobucket or something like that), how should I best tell him to scale them for a smaller filesize that still leaves plenty of resolution/histogram/color info in the image?

Sorry I'm sure I'm not wording this very well - I've never taken photos with a phone so have no idea what he's getting, and probably am not using the correct graphic terminology either... Hopefully I can get more details tomorrow about what height, width, and dpi the cameraphone image is before he adjusts them, and then ask you folks for suggestions on what approximate settings he should use to scale it while leaving me as much to work with as possible. But I've no clue what a typical phonecamera gives for output... I suspect he's scaling them with photoshop tho, but have to check that too.

The end use for these is on a webpage, so I wind up scaling them down to a relatively small size myself, but I know that if I have a better image to start with, I can adjust to get a cleaner/brighter/better looking image first, crop, then scale, and wind up better than if I'm having to start with a 50kb image that's already lost all the pixel detail...

I apologize for not realizing he was scaling them before I started asking questions - I just assumed that the images he sent were what he was getting straight from his phone camera - and it was some of your comments that made me think to ask him!

here is the plug-in (python) modLCS

unzip and place in your (user)\.gimp-2.8\plug-ins folder

as the name says, you will see it under the menu DIEGO/COLOURS