Tale of a Lost 300D Photo and AI Uprezzing

Henry Richardson wrote:

Personally, I don't have much use for this stuff to make my 20mp and 16mp photos even bigger. But thinking about it some yesterday I remembered this old 2005 photo that I felt such regret that I had lost the original. I also have some 1.3mp Olympus D-340R (bought in January 2000) photos that my wife took using the 640x480 mode -- despite me always telling her to only use the full 1280x960 mode -- old photos of family and friends that are just 640x480. I plan to see what the AI resizing can do for some of them. Also, some old photos made with 2-6mp cameras that I had cropped might benefit.

Over the last few days I have experimented some more with small photos and resizing using Photoshop Preserve Details 2.0 and the online photo resizer I mentioned above doing 4x enlargements. This is in addition to the old Canon 300D photo in my original post. Here are the photos I have tried already:

• 3 - 640x480 JPEGs from Olympus D-340R taken in 2000
• 1 - 562x456 JPEG from scanned Fujichrome 100 slide film
• 1 - 812x544 JPEG from scanned Fuji Superia 200 negative film
• 1 - 798x552 JPEG from scanned Fuji Superia 200 negative film

Using Preserve Details 2.0 I adjusted the Reduce Noise slider to try to balance detail vs. noise and I added a bit of Smart Sharpen also. In all cases the online version was better though. I wish Photoshop could do at least as good a job. I wonder if the online site is using software they wrote themselves or some commercial software such as Gigapixel AI?