Cleaning up a blurry PDF mugshot image for merchandising

Question

Cleaning up a blurry PDF mugshot image for merchandising

I am sending this through Safari on Mac Monterey; but I have Windows 10, which I will upgrade. After a two-day stay as a guest of the County, the local Police sent me a PDF copy of my mugshot. Though blurry, it was the best they could do. How do I clean it up? As far as I can see, this system contained nothing that would enable me to do this. No online feature that came up on Google Search worked. So far, I made a copy of it and changed the extension to jpg. That did not fool those features that detected it was pdf. I will appreciate any ideas that anyone has, hoping somebody successfully did this. Thanks in advance. I want to use the image for merchandising.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Blurry PDF Image

MacBook Air 11″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Oct 30, 2025 12:13 PM

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Answer 1

dialabrain

Level 10

135,287 points

Oct 30, 2025 1:41 PM in response to tightpurchaser

First, instead of just changing the extension, open the PDF in Preview and save it as a PNG or JPEG. But, even the best tools to sharpen an image can only do so much.

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

135,287 points

Oct 31, 2025 7:22 AM in response to tightpurchaser

You're welcome. There are a number of AI Image enhancement sites. I just picked Fotor off the top of my head.

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Answer 3

VikingOSX

Level 10

122,988 points

Oct 31, 2025 1:07 PM in response to tightpurchaser

The best thing to do is to go back and ask for another sharper mug shot… just kidding.

A poor image in a PDF is unlikely to improve by any means. Just a limitation of resolution. You would waste a lot of time trying to improve the unimprovable since you cannot make better resolution where it is absent.

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Answer 4

dialabrain

Level 10

135,287 points

Oct 30, 2025 5:47 PM in response to tightpurchaser

Well, you can try uploading the photo to https://www.fotor.com/ and see if you can enhance it using one of their tools. FWIW, both Windows and macOS support JPEGs.

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Answer 5

Oct 30, 2025 5:08 PM in response to dialabrain

dialabrain, Now that I saved it in JPEG, which is probably what it was originally, I don't know what I am going to try next. Chances are there is something that will export the image to another format on my Windows 10 similarly.

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Answer 6

Oct 31, 2025 6:48 AM in response to tightpurchaser

dialabrain, Safari is a little stubborn on fotor, although I am willing to bite the bullet and take out a trial subscription. I don't intend to do this much photo editing. However, I have a couple of programs from the company Ashampoo on my Windows. Mostly I use their PDF opener which works fine except that it does not have the options of Preview. The subscription page on fotor freezes on the Safari tab when it pops up. I am going to give this a rest before I proceed. Thanks. If you recommended it, then you must have confidence that it will do the job.

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Answer 7

dialabrain

Level 10

135,287 points

Oct 31, 2025 2:42 PM in response to VikingOSX

VikingOSX wrote:

You would waste a lot of time trying to improve the unimprovable since you cannot make better resolution where it is absent.

Actually that is not entirely true. There are AI tools that can approximate missing features where the was none. But, I agree, getting a better picture would be preferable.

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Answer 8

Nov 4, 2025 9:16 AM in response to Old Toad

I don't remember what the charge was, maybe something like $7.99 monthly. But I did the best I could with Windows Photo. A Church friend saw it and said it was still unusable for things like T-shirts and coffee mugs. Celebrities who had recent mugshots engaged professional photographers do them; otherwise, they'd be blurry like mine. To get a good mugshot, I will probably approximate the occasion and have a friend take it with one of my smartphones. Thanks all of you for trying.

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