This iteration of the program, however, does better than “just okay,” more frequently than not, and now does things well beyond my own skill level. Its primary utility was that it could do “just okay” attempts at upscaling much faster than I could do that “just okay” work on my own. Which is remarkable to me, because even just a couple iterations of the GigaPixel program back, it wasn’t doing that great of a job to my eye - it could smooth out jagged edges on photos just fine, but it was questionable on patterns and tended to make a hash of faces. In this case, it guessed pretty darn well. The picture on the right is a 4x upscaling using a program called Topaz GigaPixel AI, which takes the information from the original picture, and using “AI,” makes guesses at what the picture should look like at a higher resolution, then applies those guesses. So the blocky, blotchy low-resolution picture of my kid is the only one I have now. There had been a larger version of it way back when, but I had cropped it way down for an era when monitors were 640 x 480, and then tossed or misplaced the original photo. The original picture on the left was a 200-pixel-wide photo of Athena as a toddler. The quality of the output of these tools has become strikingly better.Īs an example, I present to you the before and after picture above.

But in the last couple of iterations of these tools and programs, there’s been a real leap in… well, something, anyway. Truth be told, all of these companies have been touting “AI” for a while now. Some of this is baked into Photoshop directly - Adobe has a “Neural Filters” section for this - while other companies are supplying standalone programs and plugins. One of the hot new sectors of digital photography programs is the one where “Artificial Intelligence” is employed to do all manner of things, including colorizing, editing and upscaling. Because I’m a digital photography nerd, I have a lot of programs and Photoshop plugins designed to tweak photos and make them better, or, maybe more accurately, less obviously bad.

Gigapixel video upscaling