photo resolution issue

Although Enhance/Super Resolution is great, it wouldn’t be expected to help much with this, because what it does is take good detail and increase it. If the detail isn’t great in the first place, like it’s misfocused, Super Resolution will have much less good detail to use as a base for the detail it makes up and adds.

For a misfocused image, something I’ve found useful is to not only sharpen the subject, but also defocus the background. A defocused background tends to make the subject look sharper. Defocusing used to be a chore, but it’s easier and more convincing with the new Lens Blur feature. My first try (see below) defocused the background a lot which did help, but I backed off because I realized that there is something in the background that’s very important and should be kept recognizable: The Acropolis. So, I used Lens Blur to defocus the background enough to help the foreground look sharper, but limited it so that the Acropolis was still sharp enough.

For the result below, I used the following Lightroom features:

Sharpening: (for the whole image) Increased to 20, and increased Masking to 30 to avoid sharpening noise on subjects.

Lens Blur: Defocused the background slightly. Also, the branches behind the young man on the left were distractingly sharp, so I pulled back the Focal Range to blur the branches as much as I could without also blurring the young man.

Masking: Created a People mask to isolate the family. Increased Clarity to +20 to boost local contrast (helps apparent sharpness), but you definitely don’t want to push this too far. Increased Sharpening a bit more, because within this mask, it affects only the people. Always watch out for oversharpening.

It looked like the people on the left were less focused than on the right. To even out the sharpness, I duplicated the People mask, reset its settings, and increased Sharpness by +20. To fade out the sharpening from left to right, I added a Linear Gradient mask intersected with this copy of the People mask and dragged it across.

The tools I try for out-of-focus subjects are Sharpening, Texture, and Clarity (in other words, addressing different degrees of detail frequency), Contrast, and maybe Dehaze, all done through a mask to avoid oversharpening the rest of the image. All of them must be used sparingly on people, because going too far will roughen up skin.

I didn’t provide all of the numbers because they would have to be different for the resolution of your original, which I assume is a higher resolution than the posted example. Also, this was a super quick try, so I sure don’t think it’s perfect or necessarily the best solution…it could be improved with more time.

It will still be a challenge to get the people looking good for a 36" print. In your favor, if the substrate really is going to be canvas, the rough surface will be more forgiving of less-than-perfect sharpness, so you don’t have to work as hard as if it was going to be a glossy print.