Enlarge and clean up a low-resolution photo
Make a small or blurry photo bigger and cleaner with Portman2: clean up noise and JPEG blocks, and enlarge it 2× or 4×, all on your own computer.
Right-click a photo and choose Enhance…. It suits an old phone photo, a scan, or a picture saved small from a message or a website. Your original is never changed: the result is saved as a new photo beside it.
The settings
They run in this order:
- Clean up noise and JPEG blocks takes out the grain and the square blocks of heavy JPEG compression before anything is enlarged, so they are not sharpened into the picture. The slider sets how much of the cleaned photo is used.
- Enlarge — No, 2× or 4×. A 1024 × 683 photo becomes 4096 × 2732 at 4×. The result can be up to 64 megapixels.
The dialog opens on clean-up and 4×, which suits most small photos. Save as picks JPEG, with its quality, or PNG.
Preview, then save
Preview runs the steps on the whole photo and shows the result over the original. Drag the line across to compare Before and After, and scroll or pinch to zoom in. Change a setting and Preview again; nothing is written into your library yet.
When you are happy, Save as new photograph adds it to the library in the same folder as the original, named like IMG_1234 enhanced.jpg. It takes the original's date, albums and tags, so it sorts and files next to it. Discard throws the preview away.
A preview takes a few seconds with a graphics card, and can take a minute or more for a big photo without one. Stop stops it.
Good to know
- The models make up detail that looks right rather than recovering what was lost. Small text, fine patterns and faces can come out subtly different from the real thing, which is why you always see it first and the original is kept.
- The first time, the dialog offers to download the models, about 340 MB. They are kept with the other machine learning models and nothing is sent anywhere.
- Enhance works on one photo at a time, and not on videos.