HI
@Theplantmonster
Just some quick thoughts of random advice. Just realize that I do not know you situation with your portfolio, the job, etc.
One rule I learned the hard way in life was "If you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging."
If the portfolio is to represent you skill sets on the job, and you don't have the skills yet, that could lead to future expectations of you that might be quite uncomfortable.
Again, I have no idea about you situation so take the above advice with a grain of salt.
I have no idea now to change that blurry image into something that is a high quality sharp image that represents a photograph. In those situations I look for how to turn lemons into lemonaide.
What I did in the image below was take your the image in your first post and open it in Adobe Illustrator, used their tracing tools to automatically turn it into a vector image with a small number of colors, export it out into raster and open back up in Photoshop. I duplicated the Layer, turned the second Layer into a Smart Object with blending mode set to Darken, applied the Filters > render > find edges filter, added a threshold Layer on top of all clipped to the one below (that had outlines) and adjusted until and I had good black outlines around the each of the colors of the image.
Given the limited colors and the edges with a black outline give the feeling of a relatively sharp illustration.
Just made this up on the fly and I have not idea if this is helpful to you or not.
Best of skill on your portfolio and job search
John Wheeler
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