Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
|
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
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.
|
|