I have a habit of taking photos of text—museum plaques, old book pages, handwritten notes—but I’m usually moving too fast to get a perfectly sharp shot, resulting in a library of illegible blur. I finally got fed up during a research trip where I came back with dozens of images of archival documents that were all slightly smudged due to poor lighting. Out of desperation, I tried the AI Sharpen Phototool, not expecting much more than a marginal improvement. What I got was a dramatic increase in legibility. It managed to deconvolve the motion blur enough that the serifs on the old typeface became distinct and the ink bleeds were separated from the paper fibers. It essentially turned my sloppy photography into usable reference material. This has completely changed how I approach documentation; I’m no longer obsessively retaking photos to ensure perfection. I just focus on composition and let the tool handle the sharpening later, which has saved me an immense amount of time and frustration in my research workflow.
.
