Adobe showed what it calls a "sneak peek" of some technology at last week's MAX conference, that may or may not make its way into a future version of Photoshop (we're pretty sure it will). It's a method for de-blurring photographs by analyzing them and constructing the motion path that the camera lens followed to create the original blur. Using some highly advanced magic, the resulting blur can then be removed to an impressive degree - blurred text, for instance, becomes readable.
The algorithm seems to work on low resolution phone pics just as well. Now, when they say "enhance that section right there" in just about every modern police procedural TV show, it might actually mean something.
Peter Elst captured the "sneak peek" presentation in this video:
This reminds me of how the FBI un-swirled the face of a pedophile and used the corrected photos to catch him. He figured the using the swirl effect on his face would make it impossible to identify him. If he\'d spun it a bunch more or simply used the smudge tool to mess it up more it would have been impossible to un-do the swirl.
They went public with the corrected image as a last resort because the FBI didn\'t want to reveal it was possible to do that.