How to enlarge a smaller image without distortion?
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=22076
Printed Date: 14 September 2025 at 12:08am
Topic: How to enlarge a smaller image without distortion?
Posted By: SegaGenesis
Subject: How to enlarge a smaller image without distortion?
Date Posted: 28 March 2015 at 12:05am
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I am messing around with the SNES game Mortal Kombat. In the beginning when you first select a character.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/MK_character_select.png It shows you a still frame of one of the 7 characters you can choose to play with. Is there a way to make the image of one of the players bigger? Like maybe 8x10 Inches without the image becoming distorted/pixelated? I have tried a few different sprites and programs like Gimp and GraphicsGale to make the image bigger but it always begins to look blurry when I make it bigger. Is there a way to make it bigger without that happening while recreating the image pixel by pixel? If so how? Thank you for your help. |
Replies:
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 28 March 2015 at 4:51am
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It's impossible, there's just not enough information remaining to "enhance". In the case of Mortal Kombat, all these images are initially photographs of costumed actors, so you could try tracking down higher-resolution shots, in promotional meterials, behind-the-scene, etc. |
Posted By: SegaGenesis
Date Posted: 28 March 2015 at 9:43pm
| Man that is some bad news lol. But thank you for letting me know. I was hoping since it was in a video game that there was a way to maybe add more pixels or something to help fill it out and make it larger. The images really are pretty small and I really wanted their exact profile pictures from the character select page. I have never seen any promotional stuff by them but will look for them. If anyone has knows of where I could find it or if there is a way to make them bigger without it being blurry please let me know. Thank you. |
Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 29 March 2015 at 2:01pm
| Use edge detection algorithm to create vector version of the bitmap for each of its palette entires. The vector which can then be rendered to any desired size. Then do some manual painting to enhance it even more. That is how they do HD versions of old games. |
Posted By: neota
Date Posted: 29 March 2015 at 7:47pm
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GMIC's 'Repair -> Upscale (diffusion)' is the closest I've seen to this. The technical details are a little involved but it basically attempts to vectorize things and then scale them in accordance with this information. The Anisotropy option specifies how much the result is based on this vector information, and how much is based on raster. Scaling up more than 200% is not recommended, IME. Though scaling up 200% more than once produces a better result than eg. scaling up 400% once, it's still got problems (eg. way less blurry than just hitting 'scale image' in your favorite image editor, but still blurry nonetheless.) I've uploaded an example gallery to http://imgur.com/D7u7BqR,98Vz5FL,OwZdiyq,pE74YNS,zrfShdn,DCZaXHh#0 , showing the results of upscaling a pixeled sprite incrementally, with smoothness=2 anisotropy=1 sharpness=50 . It shows 1x (original), 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, and 32x. Other algorithms are hq2/3/4x, advmame, 2xsai, etc. They are designed for pixel art. There is also the pixel art tracing algorithm included in recent versions of Inkscape. I personally dislike the results but you might find them acceptable. ------------- absolutely. |
Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 30 March 2015 at 1:15am
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>Other algorithms are hq2/3/4x, advmame, 2xsai, etc. They are designed for pixel art.
These too do vectorization, but do it pretty badly, due to the real-time constraints. xBR is a little better (but more resource intensive), but Inkscape still does a lot better work for non-realtime purposes (where you can retouch initial graphics offline): 
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Posted By: neota
Date Posted: 30 March 2015 at 2:29am
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Well, yes. The contrast I was trying to draw was between algorithms designed for pixel art, and algorithms that may work but are not designed for pixel art (GMIC Diffusion Upscale, certain fractal scaling algorithms). Since algorithms designed for pixel art tend to produce a more precise result, this presents the option of preprocessing with one of these to get a result that is a more comfortable size for processing with a full PDE-based scaler like Diffusion Upscale, or with a plain old vectorizer (Inkscape "Trace Bitmap"). It's been my experience that a hybrid approach can preserve certain types of fine detail better. (IIRC I posted some hybrid-method results in the HQx thread here on PJ -- some green gasmask-guy) ------------- absolutely. |