Improving Photo Quality

Going Up

I am a little new to photo editing. What I am running into is I take a lot of video with the video camera and capture photos off the video. Problem is they are pretty poor quality. What is the best way to improve the quality?
Is there a program that will say take .5 magpixel photo and enchance it to a 2 megapixel photo. I would assume it would have to divide each pixel up into 4 parts and be smart enough to decide what color each new pixel should be.

wxwax

Can't say I've ever heard of that being done. Not saying it doesn't exist, but haven't heard of it. I've read of ways to blow-up a shot without losing quality. But not how to improve a lo-res shot.

cmr164

Going Up wrote:

I am a little new to photo editing. What I am running into is I take a lot of video with the video camera and capture photos off the video. Problem is they are pretty poor quality. What is the best way to improve the quality?
Is there a program that will say take .5 magpixel photo and enchance it to a 2 megapixel photo. I would assume it would have to divide each pixel up into 4 parts and be smart enough to decide what color each new pixel should be.

You can not extract data that does not exist so the bottomline answer is that it is not possible. However every image has more information in it than is visible to the human eye so there are lots of enhancements that work because they make visible just that information. Contrast enhancements that select which part of the histogram to accentuate or sharpening enhancements that present frequency information visually are examples.

So do not believe the kind of enhancements that you see on TV where the video image of a bank camera is enhanced to read the patches on work uniforms.

The best you can do is probably from fractal interpolation and s/w for that is available. The one that I know is "Genuine Fractals" and it is amazing in what it accomplishes.

pathfinder

It is true that you cannot usually get great still images from a moving video file, but there is software that will let you overlay numerous still images from a video file and composite them into a still picture. I think the astrophotographers do something like this when they shoot multiple images and then composite them in an image editing program. I do not know what software they use but I suspect a little rooting around on the astrophotography sites might turn up something.

The reason this works is that the image noise is random, but the image information is not random and thus as the frames are overlaid and processed you can get a better image from multiple frames combined than you can get froma single video frame.