Enhance Button - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Computer Clairvoyance

"Enhance. Enhance. Enhance."

, "If TV Science was more like real science"

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" ignores the fact that the big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in too close on a picture are the only information that the picture contains, and extracting details that the original recording didn't contain is fundamentally impossible - that is, unless one were to extrapolate (a big fancy word in statistical analysis which basically means "we're making it up as we go along").

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 (once again, extrapolation). 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.

If you're working with undeveloped film, the basic idea is actually possible — better scanning methods reveal more detail, up to five times the resolution of HD on 35 mm film. This, combined with the perceived magic of computers, is most likely where Hollywood got the idea.

Every Everything Sensor, bar none, comes with the Enhance Button feature.

Often coupled with Facial Recognition Software and Magical Database.

Examples

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.

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 Blade Runner, when Decker analyzes 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.
- Parodied in Red Dwarf: Back to Earth with Kryten and Rimmer doing the same thing but cranking it Up To Eleven.
Used to chilling effect in 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 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. There is some handwaving about how the computer is simply "speculating", and the baddies waffle about how the bulge "could be nothing, could be everything".
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". In the movie, at least, rather than using the Enhance Button to add more information that they couldn't possess, when the image is scrolled the computer displays a low-resolution placeholder until it finishes loading the high-resolution image to memory. The same process can be seen in the program Google Earth.
Used ridiculously in Disturbia. The protagonist apparently has a good enough video camera that he can enhance a split second image seen through a hole in a grate, in a dark house, into a high resolution image.
Played with by the Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer movie Deja Vu. A secret government agency recruits Denzel to help them apprehend a terrorist using an experimental imaging system that uses satellite data to reconstruct every aspect of the bomb site in 3D, capable of zooming in at ground level, going inside structures, even supposedly recreating audio. He is extremely skeptical at first, but then it is revealed that they are actually folding space-time in order to view past events in real time.
Annoyingly used in the Charlies Angels movie, where they enhance the image of a normal CCTV tape taken in a normal parking garage. At night. Not only that, they spot their target through his reflection in the door of a nearby car. It simply must be seen to believed.
- Charlies Angels also has an auditory example — microphones embedded in the back of the jaw (behind the widom teeth) that somehow pick up the chaotic rush of air circulating in your mouth, clean up the white noise, and extrapolate the words that will come out of the speaker's mouth using that air. It works about as well as a real microphone. Exactly how difficult it would be to get a piece of software (inside the microphone, I believe) to attempt something approximating this is beyond words. You have to wonder if the creators mentally considered technology to be synonymous with magic when writing that script.
"Bringing Down the House": In it, Steve Martin joins a dating service, and Queen Latifah is his first date, Martin complains that she wasn't in the picture he received. Latifah takes him to a computer, and enhances the picture, to show her in handcuffs in the background. The troper turned to a coworker and said, "That's not even possible by computers. All she would've blown up was a mass of pixels." Coworker agreed.
Parodied in the movie Super Troopers, in a scene where Officer Ramathorn, sitting at a computer, repeatedly says "Enhance!" between random keystrokes (as a shennanigan, not because he's stupid) before his exasperated superior tells him to "just print the goddamn thing!"
Used by Rolly in F/X 2 to get an image of the killer. It takes several zooms, and each takes more time than the last, but he eventually gets a slightly over-saturated and blurry, but still altogether too-clear picture.
Played with in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid. Two lab technicians muse over a very blurred photo of Adam and his stuffed bunny, thinking it's an alien. When Dr. Hendrickson arrives, he presses one button which completely unblurs the photo.
Played painfully straight in Underworld, where the protagonist has a picture of someone which has about four pixels for their entire face, but at the press of a button it becomes a clear image of her Designated Love Interest.

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 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.
Artemis Fowl use the C Cube to enhance low quality video into much more higher one. Handwaved by that it's fairy technology.
- Removing the distortions and graininess from VHS tape, by interpolating the video, can be done using human technology right now. They do similar things, although not from VHS, when transferring old TV shows to DVD.
In one of the Tom Swift novels, saboteurs take out a camera under their boat. To prove it was deliberate, they use the Enhance Button on its last (blurry) image to reveal the knife that cut the cord. Mildly averted in that they discuss that the computer is pretty much just making stuff up to fill the missing data, but otherwise played straight.
In Rick Cook's The Wizardry Cursed, the U.S. Airforce takes a perfectly good picture of a dragon, and "enhance" it until it looks like what they figure is some new top-secret Soviet stealth airplane.
The Cam Jansen series is a series of books for kids in which the titular heroine uses her "photographic memory" to solve minor crimes. Although the testimony of a 10-year-old would already be unlikely to convince (or convict) anyone of anything, in one story, she is able to concentrate enough on a "photograph" of a memory to read the address on a magazine carried by someone walking by, utterly destroying any semblance of believability.

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.
  - CSI Miami takes the cake when they zoom and enhance an image so much they can see the reflection in a person's eyes. Said reflection is of course crystal clear.
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 variation, the image turns out to have been faked by the Cylons in the first place. Despite the outcome, however, it still contains the fundamental aspects of the trope: that it produced a clear image, and that everyone involved expected this.
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.
Inverted on an episode of Angel. After being handed a visual image taken from the psychic imprints of a blood sample, Angel asks if it can be cleaned up at all. He's cut off by Wesley, who sternly states that it's not a photograph.
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.)
- Most likely confirmed, as a later episode has Quark trying to take a Holo-Image of Kira for use in an 'adult' Holosuite program. That all he needs is to take one image likely means that technology allows cameras to take 3-D pictures. Still doesn't explain why there is a low-resolution image to begin with, the explenation is rather simple I could go out and buy a 2 megapixel camera and a 10 megapixel camera the 10 mexapixel camera will allow take a much better picture.
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. It makes sense that a medical diagnostic image would be very high-resolution. What doesn't make sense is that House's computer not only lacked an adequate monitor for viewing such images, but also that the software used to view it apparently didn't have any ability to view the image at actual size (which would have required scrolling through it if it didn't fit on the screen). I don't know of any image viewing software that lacks this basic capability.
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 satellite. 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 Numb3rs 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.
- This actually makes sense in context- the enhancing of images is a tricky and finicky business but it can be done, if there's enough motion to give the computer a good idea of what changed into what. An incredible maths wiz would have no problem figuring out the neccessary conversion on any single camera.
Done in an episode of the 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.
- The most exaggerated example was when Abby turns a blurred reflection in a car door into a portrait clear enough for a hand to be used as positive identification.
- Also the time she enhanced a CCTV camera that hung a hundred feet away from a carrier deck enough to see a pill lying on the ground.
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 the writers too much credit.
- Also on an episode where Geordi asked the computer to isolate and enhance a quadrant of footage to show a sliver of a shadow, transfer the scene to the Holodeck, then remove the characters whose shadows were obscuring the remainder of the shadow in question (how it knew which parts of the shadow belonged to whom I don't know), then asked the computer to extrapolate the general 3D volume of the shadowcasting object. Even in a holographic vector-based recording medium, it would be impossible for the computer to accurately describe a 3D volume from the shape of a shadow.
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.
Every show in the Law And Order franchise has done this.
- Subverted in an episode of SVU, where the defendant, played by Robin Williams, is caught on a security camera and the enhanced image showing his face is presented to the jury as evidence. When it comes time for cross-examination, the defendant (he's representing himself) shows the jury the actual image that the picture of his face was taken from, and points out that in the original shot he's just a blurry, shadowed figure wearing a baseball cap. He then gets the image enhancement guy to admit that everything done to the image to get a face to show up was a glorified guess. The jury returns an acquittal.
Smashed to pieces in the latest Red Dwarf three-parter, where they enhance reflections in at least six surfaces (including off a metallic H and then a drop of water on a lamppost) to read an image on the back of an object not in the original photograph in the original photograph - the scene goes on so long that it can only be a parody of this trope. Correction: the back of an object not in the original photograph, but in the uncropped version.
In Smallville, the enhance button is used on a photo which proves (through use of said button) that Lex killed his father. Unfortunately, Jimmy and Lois failed to make more than a single copy, and only made that because their computer at the Planet 'wasn't powerful enough' to do the enhancing...

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.

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 and was said to take pictures at insanely high numbers 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: "Hello, and who do we have here? Enhance! Contrast! Tint! Bright! Sleep mode! Vertical hold!"
Parodied in the Space Ghost Coast To Coast episode "King Dead": Space Ghost tells Moltar's console to "zoom in and enhance" a frame from a ransom video. The computer zooms way in until a single yellow pixel fills the entire screen as a calm computer voice says "Enhancing. Enhancing complete. Yellow... block." From this giant pixel Space Ghost somehow recognizes the interior of his own apartment.
In an episode of Duck Tales, the nephews are able to clearly identify a culprit on a surveillance tape by holding a magnifying glass up to their TV screen.
Batman The Animated Series uses this like crazy. An example: Batman is trying to identify who robbed the safe at a Boxing match. He asks his Magical Computer to play security footage in super slow motion. Then he zooms in on a thug's tattoo (briefly seen during the slow mo sequence) and enhances it so well it matches up with the Facial Recognition Software and identifies the thief.

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.
A little statistical analysis, Photoshop, and Javascript are all that's needed to recover text down to as little as three pixels in height. Law enforcement has access to software which specializes in recovering pixelated license plates, though it doesn't do any good if the license plate in question is completely blown out.
- This is just extrapolation (guesswork) and would never hold up in court.
A technique featured in CSI was actually used in Real Life to solve the murder of a cop who had been gunned down during a routine trafic stop. Cameras usually record an image wider than it what is displayed on a full screen TV. Analysts were able to get what the patrol car's camera filmed beyond the edge of the normal display area (essentially re-centering the display a few degrees to the right). The resulting image showed the shooter in action, who had previously been just out of frame.

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