Super image enhancement

[Chris Mohler]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Wade Smart <wadesmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> 20081121 1331 GMT-5
>
> I am looking for a either software or a plugin for gimp for super image
> enhancement.
>
> You know when you take a picture and there is either a face or some text
> in the background that you want to zoom in on, but when you do the image
> gets blurry - I'm looking for something that can clear up that
> blurriness. I a really nice piece of software recently but it was
> Windows based and was very expensive. I was hoping to find something
> less sophisticated but that could do something similar with say gimp.
>
> Does anyone know of something like that.

Hi Wade,

There are some interesting upscaling formulae out there - I saw one a
while back that used fractal math for upscaling, but I've *never* seen
software that could upscale without losing quality.  Nor do I think
such a thing is truly possible - you are essentially asking a computer
to *guess* what information should be present.   Many of the test
cases given for the (sometime expensive) scaling software do indeed
look pretty good, but as soon as you try applying that software to
"real world" images, they look just as bad (if not worse) than the
default resampling in GIMP or Photoshop.

I would love to be wrong on this one, but after many years as a
graphic designer I unfortunately think I'm right.  Producers of shows
like CSI ought to be ashamed of themselves for spreading the myth that
one can zoom in indefinitely with "the right software"!  Well, it is
all make-believe so I guess it's OK ;)

If you can't get the detail from doing the upscaling in GIMP ( it
sometimes helps to scale in increments) and using something like
Unsharp Mask, then there is really no "magic bullet" - you need a
higher-resolution original...

Chris