Can I combine several low quality pics into one higher quality picture?

Question

Is there an easy tool to combine low quality pics taken from a mobile phone, all of the same thing but taken within a few seconds interval from one another, mostly suffering from slight out of focus issues? How can I combine them into higher quality?

EDIT: Apparently the concept is stacking: "focus stacking is taking several images of the same object(s) which are partially in focus and combining them in such a way as to keep the sharp parts and get rid of the blurry ones"

Not quite a duplicate, but the question CSI image resolution enhance: How real is it? touches on the same topic. — Håkon K. Olafsen, Mar 30 '12 at 13:10

score 6 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 30 '12 at 18:21

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Astrophotographers have been combining similar images for years. This is called "stacking" and there is special purpose software for it. You have great reductions in both noise and in some cases, clarity, than could ever be achieved with a single exposure.

However, there is a big but to this. The prime purpose of stacking is to eliminate noise from really dim objects. It is common for have exposures that are 1-2 minutes long and to combine dozens of these. This doesn't sound like what you want.

I did mention clarity, that sounds like what you are looking for but you will also be disappointed. The best lunar photography today is done with webcams. Yeah, webcams. The trick there is that you have thousands of exposure, most of which are crap since the atmosphere jiggles. But, with a movie made from a web cam, you can discard most of them, looking for those few clear shots. You then take those clear shots and stack them.

Then point at a different place on the moon and do it all over again.

Then again, this isn't what you want, but it is cool.

edited Mar 30 '12 at 18:21

Rowland Shaw

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answered Mar 30 '12 at 15:22

Paul Cezanne

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It is possible to improve low res images with superstacking, however there will always be a limit to how far you can take that. I would say its a FAR CRY to state that "the best" lunar photography today is done with webcams. A lot of good lunar photography today is done with webcams, but telescopes can be used in the same way...take a lot of photos of one area of the moon, stack, change position, repeat (stacked mosaicing), and the results are far superior to anything a web cam could even come remotely close to producing. There is no substitute for raw spatial resolution: – jrista Mar 30 '12 at 17:11
http://www.thelivingmoon.com/43ancients/04images/Moon7/Noel_Carboni/Moon_High_Res_Half_3450.jpg – jrista Mar 30 '12 at 17:11
Yup, that's the guy, Noel Carboni. Beautiful work. – Paul Cezanne Mar 30 '12 at 17:17
Noel doesn't use webcams? You know, I could be out of date with my tech then. Back when I considered doing it the DSLR could not do video. Now that they can, I guess the game changes again! – Paul Cezanne Mar 30 '12 at 17:18
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I don't believe that photo I linked was created with a web cam, video camera, or even a DSLR. As far as I understand, it was created with an 8mp CCD "still" camera (not a video camera) designed specifically for astrophotography. – jrista Mar 30 '12 at 18:35
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@jrista Look on the bottom right hand corner of the image. It says it was taken with a Cannon EOS 20D. – Benjamin Cutler Mar 30 '12 at 21:56
Ok, so it was a DSLR, however the 20D was long before video was added to DSLR's, so my point still stands: Images for stacking were captured manually (or probably with an intervolometer) and there were only a total of 15 images. You don't really need thousands of images to stack to get decent superresolution results, however the more native resolution you start out with, the better the final result will be, and the less total images you'll need to stack. – jrista Mar 30 '12 at 22:42
I found a piece of software in Linux that does stacking of images: ale – 719016 Mar 31 '12 at 01:24
If you found a solution that works, please create an answer and tell us. – Håkon K. Olafsen Mar 31 '12 at 07:24
I don't think it is possible to take several out of focus images and make one clear one. I'd love to be wrong though! – Paul Cezanne Mar 31 '12 at 13:31
@PaulCezanne This is pretty normal to do in signal processing and computer vision. Why not with photos? – Tomáš Zato Apr 22 '15 at 23:31
computer vision can take multiple blurry shots and create a single sharp shot? That would be awesome but I remain skeptical. – Paul Cezanne Apr 23 '15 at 00:05

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 31 '12 at 08:49

I found a piece of software in Linux that does stacking of images: ale

ale IMAG0626.jpg IMAG0627.jpg IMAG0628.jpg output.jpg
Output file will be 'output.jpg'.                                                                                                                                        
Original Frame:                                                                                                                                                          
 'IMAG0626.jpg'.                                                                                                                                                         
Supplemental Frames:                                                                                                                                                     
 'IMAG0627.jpg'*** okay (92.930228% match).                                                                                                                              
 'IMAG0628.jpg'*** okay (94.896616% match).                                                                                                                              
Re-filtering incremental results.                                                                                                                                        
Iterating Irani-Peleg.                                                                                                                                                   
Average match: 93.913422%

Original site is dead, but source is still downloadable from https://web.archive.org/web/20111227060740/http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE — Matthias, May 18 '14 at 15:34
It works great. Running it in Mint 18.2 (x64) required some hacks in source codes though. — user681768917, Sep 11 '17 at 07:03

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 23 '15 at 05:28

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After some googling I found a windows program called CombineZP on this minimalistic website. The Zip archive contains sources which means you might be able to port this to other OSses.

My results were not very good but I must admit that I totally didn't know what am I doing:

image description

^{One of 20 similar samples}

image description

edited Apr 23 '15 at 05:28

MikeW

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answered Apr 23 '15 at 01:39

Tomáš Zato

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score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 01 '17 at 17:20

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You can use ImageMagick like this :

convert  -verbose *.jpg -combine combined.jpg

answered Nov 01 '17 at 17:20

kiki67100

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Does ImageMagick actually do focus stacking? A quick look at the docs for it, I don't see that the above is going to do what the OP wants – MikeW Feb 11 '18 at 17:45

Can I combine several low quality pics into one higher quality picture?

4 Answers4