Would someone be willing to enhance a photo for me? I uploaded it to a website probably 10 years ago, and for whatever reason (probably because I was on dial-up at the time) made it rather small. Can someone increase the size to about double (or 640 pixels wide), and enhance it so that it’s not fuzzy? Maybe enhance the colours and contrast as well? Basically, make it look good?
Thanks in advance.
Ooh… That’s close! Only that photo should be blue. 
Done.
Jolly jokers!
OK, I had a go in earnest. You can’t really “enhance” stuff like in the movies… Someone may know more tricks than me, but I doubt it’ll get much better than that.
Thanks, jjimm. That’s much better than my attempt with HP PhotoEdit!
Also nice! Thanks!
Here’s a quick try using a technique that most people don’t know about. I didn’t mess with the contrast yet.
If only I could have the plane instead of only the pictures!
Contrast boost, edge sharpening, color enhancement.
Something like this?
Interesting. That’s the most impressive of the efforts so far. Did you do some kind of blur (unsharp mask?) then sharpen?
Nope. I vectorized it, put it on top of the regular upsized image, and then reduced the opacity of the vector layer to about 50%, which is where I thought you got the best of both.
Vectorizing is something most people don’t do, or necessarily even know about. It means you import the image into a vector program, like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.* You then select the image and use the Live Trace function (Trace Bitmap on Inkscape), and choose one of the modes that produces a color image. From there, it’s just tweaking settings until you find the right one.** Then you save or export the selection as bitmap, at the resolution you want for the final file.
Then you can open that image in your favorite Image editor to do what I mentioned in the first paragraph. I use the freely available GIMP.
*I use Inkscape, as it’s free. Illustrator is better, though.
**For this image, that was 256 scans, no smoothing or optimizing paths.
I was trying to fix the color and contrast earlier this morning, but I made as stupid mistake last night, and now I’m pretty much having to start over.
If you think it’s good, feel free to do that stuff yourself. That’s why I went ahead and put it up. I’m horribly slow at fixing colors.
Rather than start over, I decided to consolidate our efforts. I stole runnerpat’s colors, which I really liked, and changed the sky to blue instead of aqua. Here’s the result.
EDIT: BTW, runnerpat: what did you do to get those colors?
I also use the GIMP.
Just played around with the saturation and hue and darkened it a bit and a bit more contrast. Really didn’t have a specific plan, just fiddled.
This was my attempt on HP Photosmart Edit.
I took BigT’s version and fiddled with the colors: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21791091@N03/6049297029/
Tough to do much with that sort of photo without ending up with a lot of pixelation. You can only compress just so much, and focus is not really fixable. I’ve started shooting in RAW and with manual settings, then doing correction in Photo Shop Elements.
