StarDestroyer.Net BBS

How would one go about improving the quality of a grainy picture(I dled a picture of a CD cover, and I needed to blow it up a lot, but I can't sacrifice quality)?

I wouldn't know considering that I don't have photoshop 7 and even if I did, I'd probably still wouldn't know.

I dunno. Zoom out to reduce graininess, blur, zoom in, sharpen? I have no idea.

USing the blur tool helps.

HemlockGrey wrote:How would one go about improving the quality of a grainy picture(I dled a picture of a CD cover, and I needed to blow it up a lot, but I can't sacrifice quality)?

Garbage in equals garbage out. I've done some pretty good work with badly-compressed JPEG video captures and making them desktop resolutions, but it takes time. One thing to do would be to resize the image to twice as large as you want it, then size it back down to the size you want it. This will reduce artifacts. You can do this in two or three steps to get better quality, but you'll be extremely hard-pressed to create quality where there isn't any in the first place.

If you have a scanner, you can print the image out, then scan it back in at a ridiculously large size and resolution, then blur the fuck out of it with a guassian blur, then scale it down to your desired size.

Pu-239 wrote:I dunno. Zoom out to reduce graininess, blur, zoom in, sharpen? I have no idea.

NM, zooming out reduces detail. Yeah, do what durandal said

Unsharp mask, blur, and maybe sharpen...

HemlockGrey wrote:How would one go about improving the quality of a grainy picture(I dled a picture of a CD cover, and I needed to blow it up a lot, but I can't sacrifice quality)?

Well, there's only so much improvement you can get out of a low-resolution picture.

With that being said, I've found that the following combination of steps works:

1) Enlarge the image by some percentage.

2) Despeckle image.

2) Soften or blur the image.
2a) You can do this to just edges. You can also soften the hell out of big blocks of the image where there isn't much detail. This knocks out JPEG compression artifacts.

3) Sharpen resulting image.
3a) You can also sharpen selected edges and contours of the image. Like I said, this is a fairly labor-intensive process.

4) Goto 2, repeat.

Use the sharpen tool. However, you may have to resize it first, sharpen, and resize again. Play with it, though.