Here’s a trick that I heard about a couple of years back and that I use every now and then.

Have you ever had a nice “keeper” image but that was ever so slightly out of focus? If you took it without using a flash and if there are some eyes in the image, here’s what you could try.

To make the image appear a bit sharper (this is going to be really dodgy…) add a small white dot just above each pupil of the main subject’s eyes, imit­at­ing what you would see if you had used a flash in the image. In Light­Room for instance, use the local adjust­ments tool, choose a very small brush size and set the expos­ure to +3EV. Then zoom all the way into the eyes and try hard to make out the reflec­tion of the per­son with the cam­era. Then add a bright dot right there.

The reason for that is that you’re try­ing to loc­ate a com­mon reflec­tion in both eyes in order to make your hack look more real­istic (care­ful, our brains are extremely good at detect­ing any manip­u­la­tions in the face, and in par­tic­u­lar the eyes).

Clearly, this hack only really works if you’re not aware of it. So if you look at Sophie’s image real close, you will see that it is not 100% in focus — but only because you just read this post ;-)

Here’s part 4 (of 5) of my little pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series. This time around we are deal­ing with the images shot from the tri­pod, so we need a couple of extra steps (using the mask­ing fea­ture and “View­point cor­rec­tion”) to pre­vent the tri­pod from appear­ing in our final pan­or­ama.