A friend of mine has several still pictures that he took with his video camera. The quality is very poor and I have tried cleaning them up in PSE1 with only a little success. I guess I have 2 questions. Is it possible to do anything with these photos and some tips if anyone has ever done this.
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My guess is that the resolution of those still pictures is very low, since the camera was made to capture images for viewing on another media. If that’s the case, there isn’t much you can do, because you can’t create digital information that isn’t there. You might experiment with some incremental upward resampling. (Work on a copy!) Open the image, and then go to Image>Resize>Image Size. Check "Resample" and gradually increase the resolution by about 10% per resample. Or, in the box next to the dimensions, set it to 110%. (I think – I usually do it manually.)
There are also a couple of third party apps that purport to doing a good job, but the latest information I’ve gotten indicates they really don’t do any better than incremental changes through Elements. If you want to experiment, though, an application called Genuine Fractals has a limited-use demo available for download. Do a Google search for the site.
Sorry to say, but I don’t think you’ll get too much out of those pictures.
Most video cameras which include the still-shot capability have, at best, a 1-megapixel sensor. The camera is designed to make movies, not photographs.
Like my digital still camera — it has the ability to record little movies, but they’re nowhere near the quality of even the chintziest camcorder — but it takes really nice still photos.
The added features in either device are better than nothing… but not by much.
Beth, thanks for the info, I’ll try this and see what happens.
Byron, from looking at the pictures, it didn’t look like they could be improved very much but there are some amazing people on here who do wonderful things so it never hurts to ask.
Charlie, in terms of fixing the pictures, a lot probably depends on what’s so terrible about the pictures. Is it resolution? Focus? Brightness? Contrast?
My Canon G2 takes movies, and the stills from them are 320 x 240 pixels which is 1/4 the size of the very minimum picture a digital still camera will take (640 x 480). To call them ‘poor’ in quality is to give them more credit than is due…
my new fuji S5000 has a video option. I have not used it and will never bother to. My JVC DV Cam has still pic option. I used it once ( blah ! )…why do they bother ?????
Anyways, you could try the filters listed under the ‘noise ‘ options in Elements. Sometimes they work OK depending on the image. The ‘despeckle’ tends to do a better job with multiple tries. Good Luck.
My Sony camcorder can store something like 80 images on an 8Mb memory stick, at 640 x 480. That tells a great deal about picture quality 😉 Of course, there’s more "snow" on every image than it falls on Montreal during an entire Winter season…