Scaling Low Res elements?

[Joseph W. bourke]

Butch –

A slight gaussian blur will help a bit, but you can’t get resolution out when there’s no resolution in. The best thing you can do is to set a standard and reject stuff that’s below it. I’m constantly given graphics by both our News department and outside clients that are way below the threshold. By calmly explaining why it’s going to look like garbage, and giving them a minimum file size to go on for a 720×486 (or whatever size you use) graphic, you’ll train them to make sure they get you what you need. I use a file size of 1.3mb as my minimum, knowing that I can get by with quite a bit less (with .jpg files, I can make a 300kb file look just fine as a full screen). I’m regularly given client logos that are web graphics, and asked to make them full screens. Just say no!

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Scott Thomas]

We get a lot of crappy mug-shots for newscasts from local police departments and viewers with cellphone photos of tornados. I also get the “just get our logo from the business card” crap. I wish there was a magic bullet.

If I have to use really low-res elements and make them somewhat presentable, I do a few things in photoshop that you can mix-and-match.

One thing I do is blow up the image in question 200% or better.

I will then attempt the “median” filter (under noise). that will sometimes mask some rough edges and smooth things out a bit.

I’ve sometimes tried adding noise before I do other “fixes”. Noise sometimes adds a bit of randomness that reduces banding when doing heavy processing.

If you convert the image to LAB color space, you get some new options to try. LAB color space is one luminance channel and two chroma channels. (Similar to Betacam or D1 component). I will then try adding a Gaussian Blur to just the two chroma channels and use the Median on the luminance. You might then try an Unsharp Mask to attempt to bring back some detail.

Salt to taste. 🙂

[Rick Kap]

Yeah, blur and hope for the best.
You might see if using Nearest Neighbor in photoshop helps. Supposedly it improves scaling, I don’t find it that great. You get the nearest neighbor effect in After Effects by scaling up in low res. I’d take Joseph’s advice and talk to your client.

[Mike Cohen]

Once in a while I see obvious website images used in newspaper articles. One in particular I recall was something about the Muppets – they used a really crappy gif of Kermit. It would have been better to go with nothing.
I hear ya with the “use what’s on the website” line. Some people just don’t get it.

[Rick Kap]

If you have the budget, Photozoom is a Photoshop application that claims to do a good job resizing. I’ve never tried it.

[Butch]

I appreciate all of the comments. I’ll do the blur thing and next week will talk to the producer about either getting decent stills or kicking in for Photozoom.

[Scott Thomas]

Nearest Neighbor is tantamount to just turning off all pixel filtering. I use it when I need to downsample a huge multi-gigabyte print project to a reasonable size to print or turn into a PDF for a client.

Here’s an example:
https://www.eyewire.com/tips/mini/nearest.html

[Neil Young]

I’ve heard about a photoshop application called Genuine Fractals, but don’t know if the product measures up to the hype. The example I saw looked a little soft, but then again it was blown up quite a bit https://thepluginsite.com/knowhow/enlargingplugins/

[Mark Suszko]

Genuine fractals will upsize pretty well, but doesn’t add details that aren’t already there..
There was another outfit called redhawkvision, does something similar…

There’s a free application on the web that will let you turn any image into a tiled PDF that can be printed out to any size, from 8.5 by 11 to wall size. It’s called “rasterbator”. A google search will turn it up. The idea in trying this is to blow the image up and then re-scan or photograph the blowup.

[Mark Frazier]

I learned a trick in a Photoshop seminar recently for a quick, cheap way to help with this all-too-common problem. Under the “Image” menu, select the “Image Size” option, then set the “Pixel Dimentions” selection to “Percent”. Set the percent to “110” and hit “OK”.

Apparently, by increasing the size of the document by only 10% at a time, Photoshop “fixes” the expanded pixels based on the adjacent pixels.

I set a function key to do this action, so now a simple keystroke is all it takes.

After explaining this method to another Photoshop user, I was told it wouldn’t work. But my personal experience showed that it does, and I’ll take results over theory most all of the time.

Hope this doesn’t come in too late to help you….. I’ve had to enlarge small photos and video stills all too often to move them around in AE, Boris, etc. and this has saved me many headaches.