What to do with a Blurred Image?

Ever shot an unsharp image? Don't have another, sharper shot of the same subject? OK, so it's just a digital image, who cares, you can always press Delete and throw it to the garbage bin, right?

True. However, I might be a little bit weird or something, but I also save many of the shots that aren't too sharp, because I like playing around with Photoshop... (I'm addicted; sorry!)

There are many things you can do with unsharp images. First of all, you can try to sharpen them (Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen). This works quite well with some images.

You could also have a go with Photoshop's Filter Gallery (Filter > Filter Gallery...) and see if you could create some interesting effects. - As you probably know, you can also change the default settings of most of the filters (Smoothness, Sharpness, Brush Size, etc.), so you're not limited to just applying the filter and see what happens.

I took this "macro shot" a couple of days ago on my balcony, and as you can guess, it wasn't quite what I expected it to be...

I first tried sharpening it in Photoshop, and the results were OK, but not quite as natural as I would have liked. So, I decided to do just the opposite: blur the image even more.
Here's what I did:

• Duplicated the layer and then chose: Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur.
• Changed the new layer's blending mode into Screen and set Transparency to about 50%
• Adjusted Levels and Contrast by adding new layers, respectively.
• Added a new Text layer and typed some text ("Happy Mother's Day" in Finnish); font Vivienne (also known as Vivaldi).
  
• Used the Eyedropper tool to choose a dark blue colour by clicking on the image.
• Added a new layer right below the text layer (above the other layers) and painted (Brush tool: Soft Round 200 px) a dark blue "shadow" behind the white text, to make the text more visible.

Here's the result. It's not the World's most amazing image, but hey, I'm sure my Mum will like it! :-D

Although I'm sure my Mum will like the picture, I wasn't very happy with it, so I tried a couple of other things:

• Filter > Filter Gallery > Cutout (with a small number of levels, edge simplicity 4, edge fidelity 2)
• New layer: Custom Shape Tool > Butterfly (One layer for each butterfly, so it's easier to move them around)
  

• Crop tool: I cropped just the upper left corner of the image
• Two new Adjustment layers: Contrast and Levels
• New Text layer (font Monotype Corsiva; "Have a Nice Summer!" in Finnish)

I don't think any of these images will be published in the Computer Arts magazine, nor will they be praised by professional photoshoppers, but if my Mum likes the first version, my little niece the second version, and my friends the third version, I'll be happy!