There are now several ways to upscale small photos without them losing quality. And now there’s another one that lets you do it from your phone or web browser in only a few seconds. Picsart has now added a brand new AI-powered tool that allows you to upscale small images (and keep them sharp!) in literally a couple of seconds. But is that a good thing? Let’s discuss.
Enhanced video shows vivid 1930s Los Angeles streets at 60fps and in color
Although some historians are not happy about upscaling and colorizing old footage, there are still many people, including me, who enjoy watching videos like that. NASS has recently published one from the 1930s, showing the vibrant streets of Los Angeles in the 1930s. Upscaled and colorized, it gives a new life to the footage and it’s a real treat for everyone who likes this kind of video work.
Google’s latest upscaling technology makes CSI TV shows a reality
Google has introduced a new upscaling technology that turns low-resolution images into detailed high-resolution ones It can start with a portrait as tiny as 64×64 upscale it to 1024×1024 while preserving all the detail.
AI-powered Super Resolution upscaling is now available in Adobe Camera Raw
Adobe Camera Raw now includes a new feature that will be coming soon to both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. It’s called Super Resolution and it’s essentially a machine learning AI-powered method of upscaling that offers massive image upscaling benefits at the push of a button. Well, you have to push it a couple of times and check a box in a dialogue, but then it’s at the push of a button.
Julieanne Kost, Principal Evangelist at Adobe posted a video about the new feature to YouTube saying that the model for the new feature was trained on millions of photos, and uses that data to “intelligently boost the resolution of an image while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details”.
Historians upset over upscaling of old footage
Recently, we’ve seen a bunch of upscaled and colorized historic footage: from 1911 New York to 1972 Apollo 16 Lunar Rover ride. Even videos as old as the iconic 1896 The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station are possible to upscale to 4K and get a splash of color. While many of us find them inspiring and exciting, historians don’t seem to share the opinion. In fact, they argue that the whole process is “nonsense” and they’d like YouTubers to stop doing it.
Behold the video of 1972 Apollo 16 lunar rover ride in 4K and colorized
NASA’s Apollo missions have left us with some iconic images and videos. One of these videos shows astronaut John Young as he was testing out the electrically powered lunar rover during the Apollo 16 mission. Denis Shiryaev took this video and gave it the same treatment as he did to a few other iconic videos. He upscaled it to 4K and colorized it, giving us an immersive, awe-inspiring experience.
This man used AI to colorize a 1911 video and upscale it to 4K
I find vintage photos and videos to be something special. They give us a glimpse into the past times and tell us more about what the world was like before. But seeing them in color and high resolution can make us feel even closer to the past times, and the feeling is incredible.
This is what Denis Shiryaev did with a 1911 film A Trip to New York City. He used AI to colorize it and upscale it to 4K, so you can now see footage of New York’s daily life in color and high resolution.
This guy used AI to upscale a film shot in 1896 to 4K
AI has already been used to upscale images and increase their resolution. But how about applying it to a film? A 124-year-old silent film, to be exact? Denis Shiryaev used AI on Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and turned the iconic 1896 film into a 4K 60fps video.
Google RAISR’s upsampling brings CSI-like image enhancement to your Android device
RAISR stands for Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution. It’s Google’s prototype software which utilises machine learning to provide better quality upsampling of low resolution images. They first showed off the technology in November last year, but now Google have announced that RAISR has been implemented into Google+ for Android.
The point of the technology is to save bandwidth. Many mobile users have fairly limited bandwidth. Either they have low limits, or it’s just slow. Google see RAISR as an option to save bandwidth. The idea is to scale down the images before sending out. This means they’re smaller and easier to send. Then RAISR blows them back up to their original size on the receiving end. And it wants to do this with the minimal of impacts on quality.
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