Is there a program to do this for pictures/graphics?

Factual Questions
1

Say you take a picture of something from far away, and in your picture what you wanted to see, it’s really tiny. Is there a program that you can put said picture into, zoom in on it, restore at least SOME of the quality, and then save that part of the picture?

2

Once the detail is lost, there is no way to restore it, despite what you may see on TV and in the movies (when the non-tech guy says “can you enhance that?”) - imaging software can sharpen blurred edges and stuff, but once a detail is gone, it is gone.

If the picture you took was on ordinary film, you might be better off scanning in the negative at as high resolution as possible.

3

Well, what I’m talking about, what I want to zoom in on it isn’t really distorted. It’s just really small, and all I want to do is to make it larger, heh.

4

Almost any half-decent graphics software can enlarge/reduce images. Some can even attempt to recapture some lost detail through a process called interpolation. But don’t expect miracles. You can try Paint which comes with windows, though the results maybe less than spectacular.

5

If you have multiple frames of nearly the same view, such as motion film or video, can’t they combine the total information from all the frames to get a single extra-clear picture?

6

Photoshop is probably the standard for doing stuff like this, although Paintshop Pro is also good and is about 1/8 the price of Photoshop 7. However, as mangetout says, you can’t recover what was never there. Once you get down to the level of single pixels, there’s no more detail to be found.

7

If you want to try an image manipulation program, try the Gimp - its free, and you can download it at www.gimp.org, and its pretty versatile.

8
      • It can be done way better with some film cameras & particular films better than it can be done with most all digital cameras.
        ~
9

In particular low ISO films. Slow films in the range of 25 to 64 ISO can capture an incredible amount of detail. I’ve seen negatives of 25 ISO film have sections blown up by as much as 250 times with little loss of detail.

10

The first time I tried scanning a photo on a decent scanner I was totally amazed how much I could zoom in on the resulting image.
I could zoom in enough to clearly see details that were almost invisible in the original photo.