Increasing pixels in a photograph

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Framar

Framar

WOW Framer
Joined
Jul 24, 2001
Posts
26,421
Loc
Buffalo, New York, USA/Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada
A customer brought in a handful of old photos (both originals from the 20's and 30's and bad modern reproductions of the same age photos. He also emailed me a file, saying "do the best you can." He wants copies of all photos - size does not matter, he just wants them for family history.

The one he emailed to me was gotten by his cousin from Ancestry.com and it is simply awful - 160 pixels x 108 pixels, resulting in a file 96 DPI and a whopping 5.42 kb.

Is there any way that this thing can be made any larger, or clearer? It is a photo of 4 ladies, one of whom is his grandmother.

Is this a project one of those photo restoration places could handle?

The customer's wife made a print of the emailed file, the original is like a thumbnail, and she blew it up to 3ishx4ish - it looks positively awful.

Any hope for this?
 
With image dimensions and a resolution that small, no.

If you can get your hands on the originals, you could scan them at 720 or 1440 dpi and enlarge them to just about any size and still keep them sharp.
 
I wish I could get my hands on the original photo. Unfortunately it seems to be living only on the web; someone, somewhere must have it but families are so scattered nowadays - I know, I am facing the same problem with a photo of me and my daddy that a cousin had at her mom's funeral. She scaned it badly and printed me a horrid copy and then lost the original. Arrrggghhh!
 
Framar said:
A customer brought in a handful of old photos (both originals from the 20's and 30's and bad modern reproductions of the same age photos. He also emailed me a file, saying "do the best you can." He wants copies of all photos - size does not matter, he just wants them for family history.

The one he emailed to me was gotten by his cousin from Ancestry.com and it is simply awful - 160 pixels x 108 pixels, resulting in a file 96 DPI and a whopping 5.42 kb.

Is there any way that this thing can be made any larger, or clearer? It is a photo of 4 ladies, one of whom is his grandmother.

Is this a project one of those photo restoration places could handle?

The customer's wife made a print of the emailed file, the original is like a thumbnail, and she blew it up to 3ishx4ish - it looks positively awful.

Any hope for this?
Click to expand...


It's possible she just pulled the thumbnail image off of Ancestry.com web page as it would be about that size. See if she can get an official image file from them. They might do that.
She would probably have to pay them for it, but it would be a larger file that the one she has now.
That file at that size is useless...except...

I do have an app called Perfect Resize that might make it a bit bigger but no promises. See if you can send me the file in an email and I'll see what it does.
 
The OnOne software we have is supposed to make it easier to blow up and print low resolution photos. We've had some success.
 
Good luck! I got a number of bad copies, either printed or small files, when I was doing the plaques for the WWII memorial in town. I did find some complicated ways to make them a bit clearer but I would only do it if they were unable to get me the original or rescan it to my specs and send me the file. If at all possible, see if they can get the original or get a better copy of the original.
 
wpfay said:
The OnOne software we have is supposed to make it easier to blow up and print low resolution photos. We've had some success.
Click to expand...


Same thing. Perfect Resize is put out by OnOne.
 
I am going to advise the customer to wait until his cousin returns from vacation. The cousin is the one with the account at Ancestry.com - I bet the cousin grabbed the thumbnail instead of the full file of this shot (maybe the ladies in the photo are not so important to his/her branch of the family).

Talk about a sow's ear!
 
I agree with the thumbnail theory. I hope you can get the full file. The problem with trying to enhance a very low res image is that the software has to make very broad assumptions about how things should be represented. It has no way to "know" what the original looked like in its full detail. This would be like resampling an audio file at a high rate and burning it to a CD after you have already compressed it to an MP3. You'll get an excellent reproduction of a very low-fidelity sound.
:kaffeetrinker_2: Rick
 
Can't hardly blame the customer for thinking it can be done, after all the TV dramas (CSI - NCIS and others) always show the crime lab blowing up and clearing up fuzzy photos.

There was another thread recently and I think it was Warren Tucker that gave a nice explanation why you can't improve a pic that doesn't contain the digital information to begin with.

Sometimes when I get a photo like that, I tend to take it the other direction. Explaining to the customer it is what it is. Adding a little grain / noise to it along with some distressed edges makes it look like an original old photo.
 
I did that once with a lousy underexposed backstage shot of the little girls in their pink tutus at the ballet recital. Removed a few extraneous items (like the drycleaner bag) and gave it a layer of grain - it ended up looking like a Degas - grandma was thrilled!
 
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