If you have a small image and want to interpolate it to a larger size for a music video, which free program offers the best results?

It has to support all common picture formats, not just jpg.

Use tinyeye to find a larger picture.

Don't ever upscale stuff like that. But if you do, don'y use jpeg (compression is too high!).

They all svck the same amount, so choose whichever.

http://www.gimp.org/ is the most versatile free software though.

So upscaling pictures don't work? How do the dvd players upscale to 1080p and still make the pictures look ok? (no worse than at native)

A DVD upscaled to 1080p looks worse than a Blu-ray recorded in 1080p. Just like an image upscaled from 50x50 pixels to 100x100 pixels, looks worse than an image with a native resolution of 100x100. Upscaling doesn't look terrible, but you're better off looking for a higher resolution source image.

If you only have simple, low-res source images (plus a few centuries of free time), then vector tracing is a good skill to learn. You can http://i.imgur.com/5e7HO.png as big as you want. :thumbsup:

But not worse than DVD at 720p

What about those autotrace software?

DVDs run at 480p maximum. Or maybe even 480i which is worse.


Looks like that only works with silhouettes. I think upscaling would be better quality if you had to choose something automatic.

Image upscaling works. Upscaling isn't just making it bigger, sugarcubes, there's a lot of work involved. GIMP can do it quite well.

Obviously you'll get better results if you have something actually in a bigger size, but if that's not possible then one will simply have to make do.

If you don't want to download a 'heavy' program like gimp, then try irfanview. It supports everything and has very good options to quickly edit your picture.
The program: http://www.irfanview.com/
Don't forget to download the plugin pack!

Whatever program you want to use, I'd recommend to use a Lanczos-Filter for resampling. (You can find this option in the resize/resample menu of the program you want to use).
This has the best result in most cases.