# Picture enhancement



## Gottago47 (Apr 6, 2006)

I wanted to know if anyone out there could direct me to a site for photo enhancement. I wanted to know if there was any software like you see on the TV shows where they take an image that is far away, enlarge it and then clean it up. It looks really cool and I wanted to know if there is really something like that or are they just doing TV. Thanks in advance.


----------



## thecoalman (Mar 6, 2006)

Gottago47 said:


> if there was any software like you see on the TV shows where they take an image that is far away, enlarge it and then clean it up.


Is a fantasy, you can't create what is not there. What you can create is a soft featureless image. Many of the filters for scaling up do a great job but what they areally doing is preserving the edges and filling the solid areas in with more solid. They work great on images like cartoons where there is little detail.

This isn't a so much for scaling but for noise removal: http://www.neatimage.com/index.html

They have specific filters for specific application for scaling up. I've found that simply using bi-cubic upsizing works almost as well as many of the filters on regular images. As I said they work great on simple images like cartoons and that is where they excel.


----------



## erick295 (Mar 27, 2005)

It's actually not a _complete_ fantasy - there are experts who can take very pixelated footage and identify people in it. You just have to know enough about facial features (like distances between eyes and so on) to translate pixels into useful information. It's dramatized on TV, of course, but there really are people who do that.


----------



## thecoalman (Mar 6, 2006)

erick295 said:


> It's actually not a _complete_ fantasy - there are experts who can take very pixelated footage and identify people in it.


Yes if you were trying to indentify someone that is already known by the length between there two eye sockets I wouldn't doubt it providing there is enough information in the image. But if you're trying to create a detailed image of someone that is unknown it's not going to happen. There's no technology in the world that can do that and never will be. In the end all it will be doing is taking an educated guess.

Some examples:

Image A, full resolution to provide perpective.









Image B, This will be our example of a low resolution image magnified 500%. The original appears in the upper left of the image below.









Image C, this would be what it looks like when it's scaled up 500% using bi-cubic resizing.









Although it looks fairly good what hasn't been added is any deatil because that is impossible. BTW you can do this with any good image editor that has the choice for bi-cubic and can expect similar results. The filters specfically designed for scaling an image up do a better job of keeping the edges defined which is why they look better. Another poster on another forum said he has had some better success by scaling up in small increments using bi-cubic and using the neatimage program I linked to above. In the end no matter what you do you still have no more detail than you had in the beggining.


----------



## Gottago47 (Apr 6, 2006)

Thank you to all. I really appreciate it. I have some old photos that I wanted to see if I could help make them better.

Thanks again.


----------



## hewee (Oct 26, 2001)

Try the Free DCE (Digital Camera Enhancer)

http://www.mediachance.com/digicam/enhancer.htm

It is great but the same thing goes they are not magic programs that can do anything. 
But they can help you out.

What ever you do to your images make sure to use the SAVE-AS so your alsway have the image you started with.


----------



## Saxon (Jul 2, 2005)

Photozoom could be the program you are looking for. Check it out here.

http://www.benvista.com/main/content/content.php?page=ourproducts&section=photozoompro_1


----------



## blaqDeaph (Nov 22, 2005)

erick295 said:


> It's actually not a _complete_ fantasy - there are experts who can take very pixelated footage and identify people in it. You just have to know enough about facial features (like distances between eyes and so on) to translate pixels into useful information. It's dramatized on TV, of course, but there really are people who do that.


Not really though, it largely depends on the quality of the photo etc. And usually while you can tell some basic features of the person, it's not enough to make a positive ID and probably not enough to stand up in court.

Basically what you see in TV is ********. You take a small CCTV frame that has a res of 640x480, crop out a small car in the bottom corner of the screen. Next, they zoom in on the Side mirror! There's a person's reflection. They zoom in some more, enlarge it into a full A4 photo and post it on a APB!


----------



## thecoalman (Mar 6, 2006)

blaqDeaph said:


> You take a small CCTV frame that has a res of 640x480,


That's one of the big things right there, a regular TV is only equivalent to 720x480. Very small by image standards., about .35 MP. On top of that it's a interlaced image so if you have a fast moving object you need to deinterlace which essentially throws away half the image...


----------



## erick295 (Mar 27, 2005)

blaqDeaph said:


> Basically what you see in TV is ********. You take a small CCTV frame that has a res of 640x480, crop out a small car in the bottom corner of the screen. Next, they zoom in on the Side mirror! There's a person's reflection. They zoom in some more, enlarge it into a full A4 photo and post it on a APB!


Yeah I know you can't just make up pixels... I'm just saying that a few pixels can tell a whole lot more than most people think...


----------



## blaqDeaph (Nov 22, 2005)

thecoalman said:


> That's one of the big things right there, a regular TV is only equivalent to 720x480. Very small by image standards., about .35 MP. On top of that it's a interlaced image so if you have a fast moving object you need to deinterlace which essentially throws away half the image...


Actually, CCTV uses usually less than normal TV res, even less if they are muxing 4 or more feeds into 1 and recording it like they some times do to save space.


----------

