What kind of program do I use to "blow up" pictures?

[jyates]

Hi all,

I have some pictures that were saved in a small form and I would like to "blow" them
up but still have good detail.

Can this be done with software?

I've got Paintshop pro 7 if that will do it.

Any help would be appreciated for sure.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Not really. There are probably better ways than others, but basically you can't get something out of nothing. Those pictures are a certain number of pixels, and that's all the data that's there. When you blow them up, they will have the same amount of detail, just bigger. So they'll look like crap, basically.

 

[notfred]

See BBWF's post. If you make them bigger they look like sh!t.

 

[corkyg]

No way. You can always go smaller, but not bigger. That is the nature of bitmapped images. That is why pictures should always be taken and stored at the highest resolution possible and then copies reduced for uses such as email attachments. As was stated, a saved bitmapped image containes a finite number of pixels. To make it bigger, you have to either add extraneous pixels or make them bigger. That looks like merde. As the saying goes, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

 

[jyates]

Thanks for the information. I was hoping it could be done but oh well!

 

[DaveSimmons]

You need to be living in a movie or TV show

When you take a 1280x960 camera image and save as, say, a 320x240 image then you've kicked out 93% of your pixels and they'll never come home again.

 

[jyates]

Really! I see on TV all the time they take a picture from space and blow it up so
that you can see a license plate on a bike.....hehehe....

Oh well.....Maybe i'll see if I can become an actor and get a job on a show and see
where they get their software!

Jim

 

[corkyg]

Yes - but that is a digital photograph that still has all the pixels. All they are doing is basically cropping it and showing only the license plate. With analog film it was easy - just enlarge by projection.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Analog is actually better for video/photos in many ways. I remember seeing something on tv a really long time ago, where some cops or something like that were talking about video surveillance systems, and they said analog tape is actually better, since they can squeeze more stuff out of it and read license plates and whatnot. With digital, you zoom in and it just gets pixellated. Analog isn't necessarily flat out better than digital, but I think to get the same quality and detail with digital, you have to spend a lot more.

 

[lucky9]

And the very fine grain analog films made by Kodak etc.

There are limits for negatives also.

And for satellites those sensors are very small and the lenses ore very good.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Analog is actually better for video/photos in many ways. I remember seeing something on tv a really long time ago, where some cops or something like that were talking about video surveillance systems, and they said analog tape is actually better, since they can squeeze more stuff out of it and read license plates and whatnot. With digital, you zoom in and it just gets pixellated. Analog isn't necessarily flat out better than digital, but I think to get the same quality and detail with digital, you have to spend a lot more.

Well, that point could be debated. For example, if you are a pro photographer who shoots many rolls of Provia 100F in your 1V each day, you'll not only get better image quality, but also spend less money in the long run, if you upgrade to a 1Ds. Of course, that is a worst case estimate; the average person would certainly spend more to move to a digital camera that offers equivalent quality of film.

Then again, there are some things that digital can't do, period, like 5 hour night exposures.

 

[corkyg]

I can buy that. Today I had a great photo op - a special tour of the new Big Room of Kartchner Cavern, and I used my Canon D60 with a 50mm f/1.4 lens and set the ISO to 800. It was low light shooting (handheld) all the way, and it turned out great - about 50 good pics. The restrictions were, no flash, no tripod or monopod - no backpacks or bags. Just what one could carry.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Then again, there are some things that digital can't do, period, like 5 hour night exposures.

You just don't know how. I found out something interesting by playing with my cheap webcam.

Digital cameras have way better sensitivity than people give them credit for. When you have an image that's basically black, there's a suprising amount of detail. The apparent "noise" in the image is actually mathematically relevant when you take a bunch of samplings. When you get that low, the chance of a pixel being "on" vs the chance of it being "off" is statistically relevant when you take many exposures.


Say I have a camera with 24 bit color. It's a really dark night, and a small segment of the picture looks like this: (assume these are values out of 16777215. Yeah... EXTREMELY dark)
0 1 0 1 1 0
Taken again, the picture looks like this:
0 0 1 1 0 0
Taken again and again, there's a random sampling one can get from the pictures:
0 1 0 1 1 1
1 0 1 1 1 0
0 0 0 1 0 1
etc.
Well, when you average them together, you get a lot more data:
(1/5) (2/5) (2/5) (5/5) (3/5) (2/5)

And as you increase the number of samples, you increase the accuracy of the test, assuming all your pixels have roughly the same sensitivity. You also get enough differentiation between pictures to start forming grayscales good enough for intelligble pictures.

I tried this with my cheap webcam. It worked great. Once you get the focus, you can take extremely accurate shots of areas that are seemingly black. Each shot shows nothing visible to the naked eye, but together they form a pretty decent picture.


Now.... can somebody write a program (based on TWAIN drivers or image file input) that will automatically average a series of pictures?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: kevinthenerd

Then again, there are some things that digital can't do, period, like 5 hour night exposures.

You just don't know how. I found out something interesting by playing with my cheap webcam.

Your method would work fine enough with a static image, but try doing a star trail image over 5 hours... I assume your multi-exposure composite was taken with 5 hours worth of samples, right? And you're sure the noise would average out so well after such a long period?

I still maintain that nothing beats the simplicity of loading up an old all-manual camera body with some good film, taking along a good tripod and lockable cable release, and leaving the whole contraption in the back yard overnight. With the webcam method, you'd have to drag along a laptop, deal with the extra setup / takedown time, and end up with a much crappier image anyway (at least in terms of resolution).

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: jliechty

Originally posted by: kevinthenerd

Then again, there are some things that digital can't do, period, like 5 hour night exposures.

You just don't know how. I found out something interesting by playing with my cheap webcam.

Your method would work fine enough with a static image, but try doing a star trail image over 5 hours... I assume your multi-exposure composite was taken with 5 hours worth of samples, right? And you're sure the noise would average out so well after such a long period?

I still maintain that nothing beats the simplicity of loading up an old all-manual camera body with some good film, taking along a good tripod and lockable cable release, and leaving the whole contraption in the back yard overnight. With the webcam method, you'd have to drag along a laptop, deal with the extra setup / takedown time, and end up with a much crappier image anyway (at least in terms of resolution).

Oh, well if simplicity counts, you definitely have me beat. I was just saying that it's possible, but it's certainly not entirely feasible for every case.

And, yes, over that long of a time, given a steady camera, the image remains the same.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: jyates
Hi all,

I have some pictures that were saved in a small form and I would like to "blow" them
up but still have good detail.

Can this be done with software?

I've got Paintshop pro 7 if that will do it.

Any help would be appreciated for sure.

Thanks,
Jim

Does anyone know of a program that can convert bitmaps to vector-based images (with at least some curves) to blow up logos, etc.?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: kevinthenerd

Originally posted by: jyates
Hi all,

I have some pictures that were saved in a small form and I would like to "blow" them
up but still have good detail.

Can this be done with software?

I've got Paintshop pro 7 if that will do it.

Any help would be appreciated for sure.

Thanks,
Jim

Does anyone know of a program that can convert bitmaps to vector-based images (with at least some curves) to blow up logos, etc.?

Generally the same kinda deal. You can't get there from here. You need to open it up in something like illustrator and trace it.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Analog is actually better for video/photos in many ways. I remember seeing something on tv a really long time ago, where some cops or something like that were talking about video surveillance systems, and they said analog tape is actually better, since they can squeeze more stuff out of it and read license plates and whatnot. With digital, you zoom in and it just gets pixellated. Analog isn't necessarily flat out better than digital, but I think to get the same quality and detail with digital, you have to spend a lot more.

Format, by itself, doesn't matter. It's all about the resolution of the original image. If you zoom into a frame of cinema quality HD and a frame of 1600 ISO film the frame of film will distort way, way before the HD does. Film and digital are actually similar at a basic level. A digital image is made up of pixels and a film image is made up of light sensitive crystals. The higher the pixel or crystral count the higher the resolution of the image.
When you zoom too far into analog it gets blurry. When you zoom too far into digital it gets pixelated. Same amount of distortion, just one is less offensive (blurry) to the human eye than the other (pixelated)

Lethal

 

[kevinthenerd]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: kevinthenerd

Originally posted by: jyates
Hi all,

I have some pictures that were saved in a small form and I would like to "blow" them
up but still have good detail.

Can this be done with software?

I've got Paintshop pro 7 if that will do it.

Any help would be appreciated for sure.

Thanks,
Jim

Does anyone know of a program that can convert bitmaps to vector-based images (with at least some curves) to blow up logos, etc.?

Generally the same kinda deal. You can't get there from here. You need to open it up in something like illustrator and trace it.

No, it exists. I saw a program in a book once that did intelligent tracing to logically guess what a vector-based version ought to look like. For example, a single lone black pixel on a white background is probably supposed to be a filled circle. A stair-step pattern is probably supposed to be a diagonal line. Computer AI is certainly capable of this.

I guess I'll have to write my own or something, but before I do that, I'm gonna look harder.

 

[kevinthenerd]

I'm not expecting to blow it up into more detail than exists. I'm simply expecting to intelligently transcode the format in much the same way as a font creation program would convert raster images to vector TTF's.