Fixing blurry pet photos
Fur is fine repeating detail and animals do not hold still. Phone cameras lose on both counts.
Why pet photos come out this way
Two problems compound. Fur is exactly the kind of fine repeating texture that compression discards first and that autofocus struggles to lock onto, so phones often focus on the floor behind a dog rather than the dog. And animals move unpredictably, so the shutter speed that would have frozen the motion was rarely the one your phone chose.
What to run, and in what order
Run the general enhance rather than the face tool, since portrait models are trained on human faces and do not know what a muzzle or a whisker should look like. Dark fur benefits most from the contrast recovery, because black dogs and cats routinely come out as a shape with no visible detail.
The tool for this is Unblur photo.
Practical notes
- Choose the frame where the animal paused, even if the composition is worse: a still subject enhances far better than a good crop of a moving one
- Dark fur photographed indoors is a contrast problem more than a blur problem, so expect the biggest change there
- Whiskers and individual hairs are reconstructed rather than recovered, so treat fine fur detail as plausible rather than exact
Questions
Why are my dog photos always blurry?
Phone autofocus hunts on fur because it lacks the hard edges the system looks for, and it often settles on the background instead. Tapping the screen on the animal before shooting fixes more of this than any editing does.
Does face restoration work on animals?
Not well. Face models are trained on human facial structure, so they can impose human-like features on a muzzle. Use the general enhancement on pets.
Going deeper
How to make a blurred picture clear explains the method behind this, including what it cannot fix.