Movies and TV shows have a knack for making it seem as if you could take a horrible, low-resolution image and turn it into a high-res masterpiece — the term “enhance” has become almost comical. And for every mention of magical television enhancement, there’s mention of some special algorithm at work that makes it happen.
Well, the University of Texas at Austin’s RCM Tools web app isn’t quite up to cable drama standards, but it’s their attempt to apply special algorithms to image enhancement and denoising, and it’s free for photographers to experiment with. Read more…
People often laugh and poke fun at the cliche of impossible image enhancements seen in TV shows and movies, but you won’t be laughing when you see what SmartDeblur can do — you’ll be gawking in amazement. Created by programmer and image processing expert Vladimir Yuzhikov, the program can magically reveal details in photographs that are blurry due to poor focusing and/or shaky hands. Read more…
Earlier today, we poked fun at a clip from the TV show CSI showing some pseudo-scientific photo enhancing. Many of the comments on YouTube also poked fun at the mention of “corneal imaging”, in which the investigators used to obtain imagery from the reflections seen in an eyeball. Turns out corneal imaging is a real thing… Read more…
Magically enhancing photographs to solve crimes is a staple of crime and detective dramas. To ordinary folk who have never touched a program like Photoshop, the enhancement technology might sometimes seem believable — after all, government technology is always decades ahead of civilian tech, right? However, to anyone who has any experience in photo editing, it’s pretty obvious that certain things just aren’t possible. Completely changing the camera angle in a photo, for example.
In the boring old past, printed portfolios were a great way of showing off your still photographs, but any video you also wanted to show off had to be included and viewed separately from the main portfolio. Now, new technology is allowing photographers to embed video right into their portfolios, with a small LCD screen displayed right on the page. Read more…
A while back we shared a video in a post titled “The Cliche of Enhancing Images in Movies” that compiled clips from movies and TV shows in which “photo experts” did absurd and impossible “enhancements” to photos and videos in order to solve mysteries. The above clip from British sitcom Red Dwarf pokes fun at this cliche, and takes it to the extreme. Enjoy.
