Upsacling Low resolution Images to 'HD' For Beginner! (Using Gimp)

alright hey guys I'm going to show you real quick some different methods to enhance and upscale some lower resolution images the lower resolution the image the harder it's going to be I'm going to go over some pretty easy and quick methods just to get you guys started so we're gonna be working with basically you want to find the highest resolution image you can and we'll start from there for example let's say I wanted to take this picture which is not even 720p and make it a 1080p wallpaper look here right now it looks pretty good if you were actually zoom in you notice we start to get some artifacting and some pixelation and it's not it's not so great alright so what we're going to do is one be using today which is a free image editing software and we're just gonna be using that to edit our picture so the first thing we need to do is actually get the picture if you found one online or if you downloaded one you can drag and drop it into the window or if you have one online he goes right clicking copy image and then paste it in here alright now that we have it in we can start working on it the first thing we're going to want to do is actually make it higher resolution because as you see right now it's 1200 by 645 normally if used in Windows and you put this as your wallpaper it would just stretch the image which basically just makes everything look worse we can't make it better but we can try to scale it better than Windows basically we can't actually make this look better than the original image which is right here but we can make this look the best it possibly can when stretched so the first thing we're trying to do is when I use supercool scaling methods so there are a few of them you click image scale image and you'll see the resolution here if you want to change the aspect ratio you can uncheck this but I wouldn't suggest doing it let me just show you what aspect ratio is if the case you're new to this so aspect ratio is the relation between the width and the height so if for example if you have aspect ratio on any trying to try to scale it it will still be the same shape so it will still look pretty decently good nothing will look weird or fat or skinny or whatever but if you turn off aspect ratio scaling then you can scale out however you want which may look better and again if you're doing minor adjustments it's usually fine but when you start to adjust it a little bit too much as you see everything gets squished and everything starts looking really weird so today we're gonna be focusing on using the default aspect ratio unfortunately if it's not in 16 by 9 it will give you black bars on your monitor or some parts of it will be cut off but we'll focus on that in another video or you can just crop the image so if you type in your within your monitor like mine is 1920 because it's 1080p if you click the bottom box it will tell you what the height should be for the aspect ratio as you can see it's a little bit shorter than 1080p so it won't look perfect and the next thing we'll need to do is look at in quality or what type of interpolation is gonna be used I find the best one to be sync but you can play around with these if you want to see which one you like best if you don't like what you got you can shut press just press ctrl-z and undo it alright so as you can see it has now been upscaling if you take a look it actually looks better than if you were to zoom in notice this one looks a little bit sharper than the actual original image that's not because this image is more detailed the original one but that's because we use do min on Windows or using Chrome or whatever all it does is just make the pixels larger so it doesn't do any fancy processing with using that scaling mode I showed you we can process it so it makes the stretch image look better than just the blurry stuff you get from windows alright so the next thing we're gonna do is we're going and try to apply some filters so by default like I said it looks way better stretched up but as you can see we got some weird dithering going on they see we got a bunch of colors side by side they were supposed to show detail but they just look kind of Pixley because this was in the original image we had all these little pixels but they were much smaller so they didn't look as bad now let me stretch them up they kind of look kind of obvious so there are a few ways you can do this one would be the slowest possible way is where you select individual pixels and you using either the magic wand tool to select all but pictures of pixels of that color in an area like Boop or the cup or in a select color option where you select all pixels of similar color and your entire picture and then you can run it filters that way or you can run on the whole image at once obviously doing it in small parts of the time will give you the best detail but it will also be the most time-consuming so before you make any big change you want to backup your image the easiest way to do that is just make a copy of the layer here then you can select whichever layer you want to look at you can turn off the eye if you want to hide whatever layer and it's best that you name them the names not important but it help you remember so we're a car I try this test we're gonna call this test one all right as you can see we now using the magic wand we're able select all the green of this one shade in this area so there are a few different options you have you can simply just blur it and that's using a standard blur tool as you can see it looks a lot neater but as you can see there's a bunch of holes in our thing so let's go back if you want to fill in the holes if it's like one pixel if you zoom in a lot you see it's one square that's probably one pixel so I think I might even actually two but either way if you have a few holes you may just want to increase your selections you go to select grow one and then hey look all our holes are gone so we're working on one patch of grass just for the super slow method filter blur blur all right as you can see it looks a little bit nicer especially zoomed in zoomed out look at that looks the same zoom then looks better zoom there more it looks better and comparison I'm gonna toggle off the layer we just did one call this blur just change your name as you can see for some people you may prefer to look with the extra detail but for others it's like hey we're using a really small image you may prefer to have it a little bit blurred the problem is this is a very very basic blur so it doesn't do a great job so we're gonna call this original now we turn off the eye so we don't have to look at our blurred layer we're going to try the same thing again using a different blur layer a different blur method so we're going to copy original make sure original copy is selected or whatever one you just got a copy from we have test one up here I called blur blur one and then we have original copy make sure you select that then you select your graphs again if you need to and then if you need to fill in the holes just increase your election if for whatever reason you still have holes after increasing it by one you can keep increasing a little bit just to try to get full coverage alright as you can see now our pics elations back this time ago I use a more advanced blur Mathis we're filters blur we're going to use selective Gaussian blur click on that we got some options you can mess around with but for now restore use the default ones again feel free to play around with these just make some copies beforehand and as you can see it's also blurred but the difference is this is a little bit smoother if you ask me I'll show you what I mean so here's blur number one as you can see we still got some of the detail but the actual detail it's left over from the original looks a little bit worse this looks soft so if you don't like that you can try this next blur method as you see ever so slightly it looks cleaner so again that's just another option so we're gonna call this blur - I spell that wrong whatever alright so those are the two of the easiest ways to do it let's try a third method make another copy of original make sure these are turned off so you're not looking them make sure you click on it so that's the one you're working with because whatever later you click on even if you can't see it is what you're messing with make sure you still have your grass selected I showed you how to do that filter enhance onion sharpen mask alright so here's the last option this has a bunch of fun sliders but you don't want to mess with too much so you can kind of get a little idea of the preview so basically this is a little bit more tricky but if you move these sliders ever so slightly you can affect the way that the actual filter works basically threshold is how much is applied with the filter radius is how big a little circles it tries to fix R so you gotta be careful of that it looked a simple change of that already made it so the entire grass is a different shade so unfortunately there's no reset button you typically cancel and then click filters and as a ratio opportunity what you whatever you open last so you got to be really careful at this I say just use these little arrows and tweak it till you get what you like unfortunately it's really small so you can't retail go ahead and apply it and as you can see this offers a whole different deal this actually makes it look a little bit more pixely and who knows maybe that's what you wanted so oops this makes it look a little bit more Pixley but who knows maybe that's what you wanted more like high-definition pixels if you want to call it that alright so here's what this one looks like would be unsharpened here's the original it mainly looks like it's just a little bit brighter but again it will vary with your image alright so one other thing we can do to try to make these a little bit sharper is using the sharpen option so let's go to blur one which was our simple quick and easy blur we're gonna copy this and we're gonna call this blur one all right so what we want to do is look at where we blurred highlight it again as you see now it selects everything which is nice make sure you have visible and selected layer working with filter enhance and sharpen all right so this tool is kind of intense so you got to be really careful for it basically have it too low you get no effect have it too high you get this effect so you want to find a good medium you want to basically look at what gives you like a nice little bit of pixelation but not too much as you can see like if you want you to start back here and a very end and it's back down until it doesn't look too intense I wish there was a way to zoom in on this anyway then just I think that looks good that's okay as you can see it brought some of the pixelation back and you may say like what if we just got rid of it why would we want it back well that's the thing the original pixelation was from a much lower resolution image so the pixelation we had before for the extra detail was really blurry so hopefully by creating our new pixelation the HD and eh yeah so hopefully by having our new pixelation that we just generated it will be in a higher resolution so it may look a little bit better then you've been just stretching the old pixelation basically making our details sharper so let's go ahead and take a look so here's our original let's zoom in and here's the sharpened not much of a change but as you can see especially on this side over here there's a little bit of extra pixelation and it looks like it moved it around a little bit so it's definitely not exactly the same but again it's up to you if you think this looks better let's look at it from a distance original sharpened yeah not much of a difference let's try blur twos method with a little bit of extra sharpening duplicate it I just turn off that one all right so we're just look at this grass mainly and filter let's highlight it first I use the magic wand in case you're wondering filter enhance sharpen same thing make sure it's not too high not too low but if you want to get that pixelated effect you do want to look for a little bit on the higher end alright yeah that's right alright this gives like a whole different pattern look at that that's weird let's see how it looks original is gonna see this pixelation on the side pixelation here copy it's like a whole different pattern for farther away original copy see I kind of like this because it gives you a still a little bit of the pixelation feel but you don't have to like stare right at it as you see here versus normal blur would have no pixelation this has just a little bit it's ever so faint but it's still there as opposed to the original where it's just literally everywhere so basically this mainly just gives you pixelation on the outsides which is pretty cool in my opinion again may not be for everyone may not look great on every image but it is an option so now we could do the third option the third blur but we're not gonna worry about that now we're more show you how to do your entire image like this in case you're really lazy or you just wanna get done fast you can do this on your entire image at once but it will not look as good because if you're doing one color at a time the filters work way better but let's say you didn't have much time so copy our original we're gonna call this bleurgh one fool so what we're gonna do is just select the whole entire image control a and then we're gonna do filter blur and just a normal blur and it doesn't look like there was much of a change but if you zoom in and everything's super blurry original blurry original blurry so we're gonna do it just like before make sure everything is selected control a filters enhance sharpen and you got to be really careful now since you're working on the whole image of the time some things may get super bright like that and it can really mess up some of your texture so I just want to be real careful again controls easier friend as you can see hey look it's not blurry anymore since weari sharpened it at a higher resolution it may give you a better look not always probably not most of the time but it's worth a try so yeah yo original sharpened you can't really tell much of a difference that's good that means you did it well so that's look at something else to see if there is anywhere we can tell the difference all right let's look at this grass this is notorious grass so look at it look how messy it looks and a redo as you can see it looks a little bit more detailed again it's not you're not making the original image look better you're just making your upscale look better so if you're running this at the original resolution it would probably look a little bit worse but whatever so alright as you can see it looks a little bit more shaped than the original one but you do lose some detail that's the disadvantage any time you try to do anything Han Smiths you may or may look a little bit better at a higher resolution but you will probably lose a little bit of detail but I do like the sharper look and finally unless you blur too over the whole screen all right okay so here's our full image control a highlight everything filters blur selective Gaussian blur alright as you can see it's a little bit more potent on the full image so if you want feel free to move these around turn it down some if you want since I'm doing a basically just take a look at the image and see what doesn't look too cartoony so before we're using 50 which was way too much if you're doing on the entire image so let's knock it down a little bit you can also change the blur radius if you want but I say 5 is probably good just Matt's with the mixed melt just math just mess with the max Delta first so let's try to turn that down and okay I think it looks pretty good and yeah remember this is really zoomed in okay go ahead and press ok and I actually really like this okay some of the trees look a little bit too soft but overall it looks really nice pretty much all of the pixelation is gone so if you wanted this as your final product you could actually totally use this I mean look at look at the ha'la'tha velvet look how nice this grass looks but again it does make everything look a little bit flat I don't think this is a separate layer so we'll go ahead and copy this and then we'll try the filter so I know I want to see how sharp it looks on this so we have everything selected control a filters enhance sharpen alright and that looks like way too much sharpness so let's back it down in case you're wondering how much how you know it looks way too sharp is if your colors have changed and it looks like you have like black lines everywhere that's probably too much start like this see how to make everything wait really bright and really bold you don't want that so you want to mean halfway between this and this mess so I say start the end back it down until you can barely notice it but you still won't get some of the effects so just find some you like play around with it and enhance and there you go so as you can see looks a little bit sharper let's compare it to boom-boom-boom looks a little bit brighter too so that's just let me keep in mind sharpness doesn't change the brightness a little bit but anyway on screen right now I'll have all three of the different choices so you can see how they look for yourself but again unfortunately it will look different for each image that's why I showed a bunch of different methods so try them out see which one you like best anyway I'll if you guys have any questions the post minute comments unfortunately uncheck comics super often but next time I'm on I will check try to do some more videos with some more advanced techniques but this was hopefully just enough to get you started and I guess I'll see you guys the next video bye

Channel: TutorialsForTheWin

Views: 11,586

Keywords: gimp image, gimp, image, upscale, hd

Id: NDDEqESWPe0

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017