Deposit Photos is now offering a tool to double the size of any image. In playing experimenting with it, it doesn’t seems like it’s as awesome as they claim.
Here’s the main sample they provide. When you compare their two images, it’s amazing. There’s fine detail that’s being extrapolated. Pixelated edges have become smooth.
Here’s what is actually produced when you run their own sample “before” image through their enlarger. Frankly, we can’t tell the difference for this image. So I’d say they’re definitely playing fast and loose with the truth.
That said, some of the other experiments that we tried did seem to help sharpen some details and reduce pixelization.
It’s certainly no ‘Enhance Button‘, but it may come in handy if you’re saddled with low resolution images from product vendors. It will probably look better than letting your browser scale up an image. We’ll look for opportunities to use this tool in real world experiments and see what this tool is actually capable of.
Updated 12/08/2023: It’s been almost 2.5 years, and AI has come on to the scene. We really do have something close to an ‘Enhance Button’. Granted it can’t discover hidden details in a low-res picture, but it does an amazing job of guessing what should be in the picture and fill in details. Here’s the about test image run through Booltool’s ‘Image Enhancer‘ that we showcased in this article. Not only has detail been brought out, the resulting image is twice the size of the original.
