Re: Photo improvers

On 4 Nov 2024 at 20:02:27 GMT, Gordon Freeman wrote:

RJH <patchmoney@gmx.com> wrote:
 

I've got a few ropey 100kb or so copies of photos I'd like to

print at

A4 size. So something that could lessen the blockiness and make

them

look more presentable would be useful.
 
Anyone any experience of the many 'AI' photo enhancement websites,

or

desktop software, that does a decent job of such a task?
 

 
The deblocking filters available in some video editors can be very
successfull but I don't know of an easy way to apply them to still
images.
 
One thing worth trying is the Quantsmooth plugin in Irfanview. If
you go to Properties > JPG/PCD/GIF > "JPEG Load" and tick "load
using Quantsmooth" then open the image, it tries to reconstruct the
lost precision of the quantisation values. The difference on a good
quality JPEG is marginal and not worth the extra loading time, but
on a very small or poor quality one it only takes seconds and cleans
up the artefacts very well, and in fact the author of the plugin
particularly recommends using when printing low quality images.
 
There's also a standalone Quantsmooth progran for Windows or Linux
downloadable from https://github.com/kilobyte/jpegqs
 
 
I'm sure an AI program would do better, in particular inventing
plausible detail when enlarging a low res image, but I've no
experience of using any of them, and whereas Quantsmooth only takes
a few seconds to run, I understand AI programs typically take hours
to do their magic.

Thanks, interesting. I tried the web page version:

https://ilyakurdyukov.github.io/jpeg-quantsmooth/

. . . and didn't notice any difference. Think I need something more GUI based
. . .

--
Cheers, Rob, Sheffield UK