Video & photo AI upscaling
From
Nightfox to
All on Tue Nov 25 16:06:07 2025
I imagine most of us probably have taken a lot of photos in our lifetime, for family gatherings & other memories, as well as when traveling for vacation. I still have some photos going back to 1997 or so - At the time, those were from film cameras, which I've since scanned into my PC (I still had the film negatives, and I scanned those for the best quality); I started seriously transitioning to digital cameras around 2002-2005 or so. But a lot of those old photos are fairly low-resolution, as storage space was more limited back then, and especially since digital camera technology was limited back then as well.
Several years ago, I discovered a company called Topaz Labs, which makes AI-based photo and video editing tools, which are designed to do things like upscale with good sharpness (basically filling in details it thinks should be there), de-noising photos, sharpening photos, etc.. I've used their Gigapixel software to upscale photos, much of the time with good results. I've also used their Video AI software to upscale old videos; that & other software has also been used by fans of various TV shows to try to upscale TV shows that are still only available in 480p & such (such as DVD). I myself have upscaled some episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Voyager (which still don't have high-definition remasters and are only available on DVD). The AI is meant to upscale them better than traditional upscaling, which simply streteches the image and can produce output that can often lack sharpness.
Results with this stuff can be mixed though. So far, it's still a matter of garbage-in, garbage out; the higher the quality of the source, the higher the quality of the output. Specifically for upscaling the TV shows, I've found that while some episodes look fairly good when upscaled, others don't so much. I think the issue with shows like Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Voyager is that I've heard the final versions which are out there were mastered to videotape, which looks okay for old tube TVs (and hence why the DVDs were made), but they lack quality. And that's the reason they've decided not to do HD remasters of those shows right now. I've heard they'd need to re-do all the digital special effects; that and the whole process of upscaling the other parts of the video would be deemed too expensive. The Star Trek TNG HD remaster was great, but I've heard it didn't sell well enough for them to want to do more.
I've also upscaled some 1080p blu-ray rips to 4K (including some of the blu-ray HD episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation). That can generate some noticeably good-looking results, but it can also be hard to notice the difference unless you're looking up close.
I've upscaled one of my blu-ray concert videos (The Eagles Farewell 1 Live from Melbourne), and currently I'm working on upscaling a couple other concert blu-ray videos to 4K (Paul McCartney's "The Space Within Us" and Rush Time Machine 2011).
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