Enhance Button - Television Tropes & Idioms

The "Enhance" button on the computer is able to turn a tiny, blurred, grainy image in a photo or video into a clear, unmistakable piece of evidence. This process is virtually instantaneous unless added dramatic tension is called for in which case extra Techno Babble or more Applied Phlebotinum may be needed.

There are real techniques that vaguely fit under the category of "image enhancement" that can enable one to see details in a picture that's blurry, grainy, dark, overexposed, etc., but this use of "image enhancement" seems to fail to understand that the big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in too close on a picture are the only graphical data that that image contains, and that magically creating out of thin air details that the original recording technique was too low-res to capture is fundamentally impossible.

Sometimes this is HandWaved, where the enhanced image is still blocky/blurry, a higher-up will tell the techie to "clean it up" using their madd computer skillz. and then it becomes close-up quality. In reality, any techie or automated system capable of doing something like this would essentially be making things up -- looking at a blurry picture and drawing in details that they guess are there. The day may come when computerized "image reconstruction" is capable of making up something plausible using methods like this, but it would be akin to guessing what a missing page in a book said based on the surrounding pages -- just a guess, and certainly not proof admissible in court.

In some particularly jarring examples, they will even be able to change the focus of the image. Adding color to a black-and-white image (which, in real life, consists of deciding what color you want something to be and painting it in) or drawing a wireframe around an object and rotating it to see what the back of it looks like are also common, and equally involve techniques that in real life could only consist of making things up.

With film, the basic idea is actually possible -- better scanning methods reveal more detail, up to five times the resolution of HD on 33 mm film. This, combined with the perceived magic of computers, is most likely where Hollywood got the idea.

Often coupled with Facial Recognition Software and Magical Database.

Examples:

Live Action TV

In one episode of MacGyver this was coupled with some very realistic-sounding but ultimately ludicrous Techno Babble: "Create a bitmap. Now increase the Z-axis while holding the X and Y axis steady."
CSI likes to rely on the NTSC overscan to find hidden details in an image. In one episode, they are able to reconstruct a recognisable image from the reflection in someone's eye. At night. In the dark. From a grainy CCTV image. Another similar example involved getting a recognisable image of a person behind camera from the reflection of someone's sunglasses in the window of a car.
- CSI had a particularly egregious example when they showed off a 3D crime scene scanner. Such a device does actually exist, using a laser to create a 3D image of an area, but then they used the computer to ''lift the body off the bed to look at the stains on the sheets underneath it''. It's the equivalent of taking an ordinary photographic image and being able to "strip away" the skin and muscles to get an image of not just the structure of the person's bones, but what color they are.
Subverted on Cold Case episode "Time to Crime." Detectives Vera and Jeffries are watching a videotape and notice something interesting in the background. Jeffries says, "Let's enhance this." The two detectives then get up from their chairs and walk closer to the TV screen.
Averted in Due South, when a face from a crowd at a hockey game on television can't be enhanced because his three-block face will still only be three blocks when enlarged, resulting in no additional detail.
Also subverted on the British show KYTV in their murder special, where they examined some CCTV footage and attempt to zoom in, but the enhanced version is even worse than the original.
In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica revival, a character says it'll take a day to enhance the picture of someone's reflection in a computer mainframe, as seen in CCTV footage. The computer ultimately produces a crystal-clear image of the character who had been implicated of sabotaging the mainframe, but in a subversion, the image turns out to have been faked by the Cylons in the first place.
Parodied on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, when viewing some fuzzy CCTV. One character asks another to zoom in on an element, and after being told no:
Cordelia: So? They do it on television all the time.
Xander: Not with a regular VCR they don't.
- This is followed a few lines later by the immortal exchange:
  Oz: What's that? Pause it.
  Xander: Guys! It's just a normal VCR. It doesn't... Oh wait, uh, it can do pause.
In the Columbo episode "No Time to Die", Columbo's nephew's bride is kidnapped. The cops spot the kidnapper in the background of one frame from a security camera. They're able to not only zoom in on the man's face, but also read the lettering on his class ring.
- This trope -- in fact, this specific episode of Columbo -- is parodied in this webcomic.
An early episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine has a possible war criminal apprehended by the crew. After finding the only known picture of him is blurry and small, they enhance it to perfect clarity and rotate the camera around the scene to get a clear view at his face. (Like the Blade Runner example, this may be because they have magical future technology.)
House dances on the brink of absurdity: complaining that he can't make out any detail on his small TFT computer monitor from video footage of a heart scan because "the pixels are the size of Legos", the gang watches the same footage on a bigger HD TV in the staff break room, and still not seeing anything until they project the footage in the hospital cinema -- they don't get as far as the prophesised "breaking into the IMAX". If the same signal was being being used in each case, all they would've accomplished is upsizing the pixels to housebricks.
- They get away with this in principle: a digital cinema projector would have a higher output resolution than the HD TV, which would've had a higher resolution than the monitor, and the original scan may have been big enough to benefit from the extra pixels. But maybe that's giving them too much credit.
  - I would give them that much credit, except for one thing: Shouldn't they have been able to zoom in? They seem to be forced to use "Fit to Screen" – I'd complain about not having a 1:1 setting. Then again, maybe none of the characters involved were that computer literate.
In Babylon 5, not only is the computer able to enhance a motion-blurred image to perfect clarity, it is able to figure out from a vague verbal instruction which portion of the image Londo wants to enhance.
In one episode of Spooks, an image of a meeting between two characters is captured by a spy sattelite. MI 5 are not only able to enhance this image but actually rotate it to see the face of the second person. Unlike DS 9 and Blade Runner the show is set in the present so this cannot be handwaved away by bringing up magical holographic photographs.
Made fun of in Monk, ep "Mr. Monk and the Birds and the Bees" a security video was enhanced, but still too blurry to make out who the people are.
Not as bad as the rotating or moving examples, but the pilot of the short lived TV series Threat Matrix had Homeland Securities examining a picture of a criminal they got from a traffic camera. Unfortunately somebody else is standing in front of him so they can't see what he's holding so they simply remove the obscuring man from the footage, revealing the briefcase the criminal was holding.
In the series Early Edition the characters want to enhance a thirty-year-old photograph which shows a potential presidential assassin. For reasons of plot, this takes several hours. When it's done, it's clearly someone they're helping. But just to hammer this home, one of them says "Can you age that by thirty years?" A few keys are pressed, and the people in the picture age instantly.
A first season episode of Numb3ers attempted to subvert this trope; Charlie explained how image enhancement as sen in the movies was unrealistic. This did not prevent him from enhancing an image a few minutes later, with the explanation that he used math.
Done in an episode of the X-Files. White noise with a vague blur behind it is run through magic software. Once you take out all the white pixels of snow, what's left certainly shouldn't be a vital clue. But of course it is. Of course, the vague image was placed there by a ghost, so maybe the normal rules don't apply.
Mildly averted in NCIS: Sometimes, Perky Goth Abby just can't enhance that photo enough to help out the team, but... let's face it, she usually does.
One word, on Star Trek - "Magnify".
- On an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, Riker was able to determine that his main squeeze of the week was an ancient assassin by enhancing a picture which had her face obscured by people in front of her, and that only showed her arm.
  - Well, it's the future - maybe they use a new image capture standard that's vector-based and infinitely scalable, which allows for this sort of thing. Or maybe we're giving them too much credit.
Family Matters: Steve, testifying in a trial, points out that it is possible for the security-camera footage with the defendant robbing a jewelry store to have been altered. He does this by replacing the defendant's face with that of the judge. The clincher being that the perp forgot to edit his face out of a mirror in the store. It turns out to be the bailiff. No, really.

Film

The climax of the 1987 film No Way Out hinges partly on the excruciatingly-slow "enhancement" of a tiny, blurry Polaroid picture -- continuously displayed with a Viewer Friendly Interface so the moviegoer can see just how close it is to implicating Kevin Costner as a Soviet mole.
Parodied in Mel Brooks's High Anxiety. As the main character blows up the picture, he finally gets a poster sized copy, which he examines with a magnifying glass before exclaiming, "Aha!"
Taken to a ridiculous extreme in the film Blade Runner, when Decker analyses a snapshot to bring out truly magical levels of detail, including following a reflection around a corner. But then, this is a mid-21st-century snapshot, which may well be partially 3-dimensional (i.e., a hologram) and be fractally encoded.
Used to chilling effect in the film The Last Broadcast. Ostensibly a documentary looking into the murder of three filmmakers years after the event, the documentary maker asks a photographic expert to enhance an blurry image of a monstrous-looking creature. The image is returned to throughout the film, each time being slightly clearer, but is only revealed at the end. It turns out that the image, as well as being blurry, is also stretched vertically, and turns out to be a picture of the documentary maker, who is implied to be the original killer.
In the movie Enemy of the State, they take a frame from a security video, and then rotate the image in 3-D, Matrix-style, in order to see a shopping bag hidden behind someone's back.
Used in the remake of The Pink Panther, to zoom in on the picture of Clouseau's airport accident, allowing the Pink Panther diamond to be seen on the bag scanner. Well, he could actually see it before he zoomed. So the theory behind it isn't wrong. The representation is though.
There's an early example in Call Northside 777, a film from 1948, in which a reporter proves that a witness lied in a trial eleven years earlier, by blowing up an old photo of the witness and the accused together, so that a minor detail, the date on the newspaper in the hand of a paperboy in the corner of the photo, becomes clear, thus establishing that the witness saw the suspect the DAY BEFORE she made her identification, was therefore lying, and the suspect is therefore innocent.
In Stargate the movie, technicians used several presses of the Enhance Button to discern glyphs on the other side's Stargate. Stargate SG-1, however, mostly avoided this trope... Mostly. It still crept into "Endgame".
Used ridiculously in Disturbia.

Literature

A character does this "by hand" in a Babysitters Club novel: After she's blown up a couple photos as much as she can and still can't make out a background detail, she photographs the pictures and then blows those photos up, resulting in a perfectly clear and damning piece of evidence.
Feet of Clay, one of the Discworld Watch books, parodies this with a sort of Victorian-era proto-CSI making an imp paint smaller and smaller portions of a picture of the victim's eyes, eventually revealing the burned-in image of the last thing he saw.
HandWaved in the book Dirty Martini by J. A. Konrath, where a tech-savvy police grunt drops some Techno Babble to describe how they were able to filter and blow up a grainy picture until it became legible.

Western Animation

Parodied in 24 Minutes, The Simpsons' spoof of 24; Principal Skinner orders Lisa to enhance a photo of a message carved into a classroom desk. When it turns out to be a slur directed at him, he shouts "De-hance! De-hance!"
Parodied in Clone High, where Abe Lincoln watches a videotape and, upon seeing something of interest, rewinds it and tells the VCR to zoom and enhance the image. Needless to say... it does.
Justified in an episode of Lilo And Stitch, where the camera in question was invented by a Mad Scientist an was said to insanely high number of pixels.
In Squidbillies, Early, on trial for attacking baseball players during a game, tells the court to "Zoom in! Enhance!" the evidence footage. The lawyer responds, "We can't do that. That's really more of a sci-fi thing."
Parodied on an episode of Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law. While looking through security footage, Phil modifies the image: "Enhance. Contrast. Tint. Bright. Sleep Mode. Vertical Hold."

Video Games

Partially subverted in Case 4 of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - a "blown-up" photograph still doesn't show the faces of those in it, as the shadows in the original photo weren't affected by enlarging, but it still becomes vital evidence for another reason.

Anime

Parodied in a Honey and Clover episode, in which one of the characters pauses, rewinds, enlarges, and enhances the face behind the waterfall of one of his own memories. It works, naturally, although it helps that he was obsessed with the character in question.

Real life

There are actual image-enhancement techniques that can do things like see what a person is looking at by distortion-correcting the reflections in their eyeballs, or reconstruct a scene from the point of view of the light illuminating the scene, but they generally require extremely high-resolution images as a starting point.
The real technique of super-resolution can produce higher-resolution images from a sequence of low-res images shifted by fractions of a pixel (which naturally occurs during video recording). The levels of enhancement seen in fiction are still ridiculous compared to this, though.

Destruction Equals Off Switch

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