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Let's Enhance - Boost photo resolution 4x

over 3 years ago from , Web/UI Designer

This is blowing my mind. letsenhance.io will take your pixelated photos and create a "magic" version that's apparently up to 4x your photos original resolution.

Take a look at a small photo I uploaded: Let's Enhance test

I've never seen this kind of information recovery from a small pixelated photo. Sometimes my clients don't have nice hi-res photos to put on their website. In certain cases, this could be a huge help. This would probably work on low quality pixelated logos too! Excuse me while I do some more testing... I'll add before/after of a logo too if that works out. This is amazing!

Update:

  1. Low-res logos are improved in some regards, but it's not a game changer. I've added two examples to the linked dropbox folder above.

  2. Normal-res photos don't really benefit from this processing. It takes a long time and the end result is smoother, but hasn't really added any details.

8 comments

  • Ferdi WielingFerdi Wieling, over 3 years ago

    "ETA: 3 hours."

    Ain't nobody got time for that.

    1 point
    • Brandon ZellBrandon Zell, over 3 years ago

      I'd recommend testing with a small pixelated photo. I was seeing an ETA of around 2 minutes, although the ETA wasn't always accurate.

      On the other hand, what they're doing is simply amazing. If the ETA was a week, I'd still use it because I'm not aware of any alternatives!

      Update: I just started another test with a very small photo (about 200x200px) and the ETA is an hour. So perhaps they're experiencing more users or something causing the processing time to escalate.

      0 points
  • Cristian MoiseiCristian Moisei, over 3 years ago

    Whoa, that is cool. But they want my email, which they will must likely sell / misuse.

    1 point
  • Aaron Wears Many HatsAaron Wears Many Hats, 3 years ago

    Ok, so it looks to have made some improvements to a low-res subaru meme I had.

    Original: https://imgur.com/zaeGlBj

    "Magic" version: https://imgur.com/W1OcS32

    I used this image simply to see what would happen quickly, it was pretty small and didn't want to wait. There are a lot of artefacts, including what appears to be a... theme park? In the bottom right hand corner. I'm guessing that was a really blurry watermark which the interpreter couldn't deal with. Classic deep dream artefacting... Also the quality of the text isn't great. No comment on the image itself because of it's blurriness to begin with.

    Then I tried a much sharper image: https://imgur.com/K1ZAidC

    With the resulting 'magic' version: https://imgur.com/cCvYVyD

    As you can see, it did what it said on the box: The image is 4x larger. BUT, it looks dreadful.

    My opinion then, is you're probably better off just putting your small logo into photoshop, and then drag it bigger with the transform tool. You'll get similar results lol.

    0 points
    • Brandon ZellBrandon Zell, 3 years ago

      Let's Enhance works best with clearly pixelated images, plus it seems to work better with photos than illustrations and text. For the right type of photo, the results are just amazing.

      Grab an image off Facebook. They downsize the original upload, so the posted photo will likely have the clear pixelation that works so well with Let's Enhance.

      The Next Web wrote an article about Let's Enhance.

      Here's their comparison photo. Super impressive: Small vs Magic vs Original

      1 point
    • Dennis Schmidt, 3 years ago

      Of course the image quality suffers in some way when you enhance it. But come on, this is about 1 million times better than dragging an image into Photoshop and enlarging it by 400%. I tried this myself with a photo and the 'Photoshop image' is nowhere near the result from letsenhance.io. It sure hits the wall at some point, but cut them some slack.

      1 point