PIXEL PROPHET
PIXEL PROPHET
REVOLTION OF SUPER-RESOLUTION
With AI potential, Martin Christie uncovers the power of a super-resolution — upsampling images four times without losing quality.
T
he printed image’s power has long been a running theme in this column; thankfully, it remains a truth. When the onset of digital technology started, many predicted it would be the end of anything committed to ‘old fashioned’ paper. Of course, the electronic revolution has meant that pictures can be captured, transmitted and shared in previously unimaginable quantities. Still, the very volume and the instant ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of so many of them makes them as disposable as yesterday’s headlines. Just how many of today’s top internet images will stand the test of time remains to be judged by future generations, but fortunately, the previous technology of photography has left us some priceless insights into not so distant history. Helped by modern techniques of enhancing colour and detail, those memories have now been brought more up to date, as you may have seen last month in the restoration of the Victorian soldier, a veteran of the Crimean War, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Back then, taking photographs was in the hands of a handful of specialists using cumbersome equipment, and processing was done by hand, often in a makeshift tent on the spot. Despite the difficulties, it’s estimated that over a million photographs were taken a little later during the four years of the American Civil War. Though many have survived to provide a unique visual record, most of the glass negatives were recycled to fill panes in greenhouses to be lost forever. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Kodak company invented and introduced the box camera, with its roll of negatives, meaning that shortly photography would be in the hands of the general public, and the days of many individual portrait studios would be numbered. John Swartz knew the writing was on the wall, and he was open to any opportunity to bolster his business in Main Street, Fort Worth, Texas. So he was grateful when in November 1900, five apparently wealthy, well-dressed strangers came to sit for him. He had no idea his photograph would eventually be seen so widely and still reproduced long after the old Wild West had disappeared into the cowboy books. He was, however, so pleased with the picture that he printed a large copy and put it in a frame in his window as an advertisement. It caught the attention of local detective Charlie Scott who immediately recognised some of the faces and notified the famous Pinkerton Agency who had been searching for notorious train robbers Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh — better known to us as legends Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The rest, as they say, is history, although with a little bit of artistic licence from Hollywood. The peril of the unexpected consequences of published images is, therefore, nothing new. However, now with digital imagery and social media, it affects everyone with a mobile device — not just the rich and infamous. Fortunately, for most, the results are not as terminal as they were for the members of the Hole in the Wall Gang. The reason such images have survived, and are still of sufficient quality to be enhanced, is because they were real hard copies, whether in negative or positive form, even if many of those who had them taken didn’t always appreciate their future value. Almost the opposite seems to be true of digital files. As so few use them to realise how fragile and short-lived they may be, rely, as they do, on algorithms they do not really understand as well as power and processors, all of which may one day fail them. Then there is the sheer volume of content to deal with. I first heard the term Digital Asset Management twenty years ago. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how important it would become. But mention DAMs today, and I would guess few would really know what it meant, even among those who should know better. If you have spent any time with a friend or a customer searching vainly for a particular picture on a mobile phone, then you will know exactly why it is important, and why nobody bothers to use it until it’s too late. I still have boxes of old 35mm negatives, which I can still print from or scan to restore to former glory because they are preserved in their original state, but I have 14
lots of more recent JPGs which are beyond any worthwhile restoration, and more that have just disappeared somewhere on failed hard drives, and redundant memory sticks. Even if I’ve found an old JPG, I’m disappointed to find I’ve only saved a low-resolution email version and not the larger original, so it’s pretty pointless trying to update it because it’s not going to look any better. So, like most professional photographers, some years ago, I wised up and started shooting in RAW, saving that nondestructive file and only editing a JPG or TIFF copy. That way, there was going to be an original ‘negative’ to go back to. With improving software performance over the years, it was becoming possible to start again from the beginning. How often have you wished you could do that rather than save multiple files with different versions and titles? Most customer files, of course, are not in RAW and have already been destructively edited by them or the device they are using. By destructive, we mean an action that cannot APRIL 2021 • QUICK PRINT PRO
