Enhance Button - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Computer Clairvoyance

"Zoom in. Now... 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. May require someone to stand next to the computer intoning "Enhance.... enhance..." for full effect.

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 interpolate (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.

An enterprising troper has edited together a montage of the abuses of this trope covering many of the film and live action TV examples: Let's Enhance

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime & Manga

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 a secondary character blows up a photograph, he pins up a series of even greater enlargements until he finally gets one roughly 20 feet across, which he examines with a magnifying glass before exclaiming, "Aha!"
- Considering the fact that it was good picture taken with medium-format camera it is still more realistic than most examples on this page.
Taken to a ridiculous extreme in Blade Runner, when Deckard analyzes a snapshot to bring out truly magical levels of detail, including following a reflection around a corner.
- The Video Game tie-in lets the player do this as well.
- Parodied in Red Dwarf: Back to Earth with Kryten and Rimmer doing the same thing but cranking it Up To Eleven.
- Who knows, those photographs might be super-detailed 2019 prints!
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".
- And then the Big Bad's next words order his subordinates to find out precisely what it is, presumably so they have concrete evidence instead of speculation.
- Not to mention the trailer contains a scene where Zavitz is viewing the footage shot by his wildlife camera, and he pauses it and rotates the view to see Reynolds' henchman stick a needle in the congressman's neck. In the actual movie, he simply sees in in the background and zooms in.
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 be disbelieved.
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.
Mocked in Super Troopers, in a scene where Ramathorn, sitting at a computer, repeatedly says "Enhance!" between random keystrokes (as a shennanigan, not because he's stupid), before his exasperated superior yells at him to "just print the damn 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.
In Taken, Brian Mills gets a lead on his daughter's kidnapping by enhancing a photo found on her camera phone card, in which the spotter was a faint reflection on a nearby phone booth. This isn't so amazing until you realize he did this at a photo kiosk in a subway station.
Largely averted in U.S. Marshalls. Zoomed in CCTV footage is visibly pixellated, and the focus is fuzzy, if not quite as badly as it should be.
This forms the plot of Antonioni's Blow Up: A photographer tries to elucidate a murder he caught on camera, but loses resolution as he tries to enhance his picture.
Star Trek Generations. While the Klingon women are watching through Geordi's visor, he looks at a control panel in Engineering with a graphic of the Enterprise.
Woman: That's it! Replay from time index 924. Magnify this section and enhance! Shield modulation: 257.4.
- Well, I should hope Geordi's visor lets him see the panels he works with on a daily basis.
Sneakers. While the team is watching a video of a man getting into a car:
Bishop: Can we get plates?
Mother: Let me see. Zooming in. Another bump. Enhancing. There's your plate. 180 IQ.

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.
- Sounds like Sergeant Colon's logic in the Discworld novel Thud! When he's told that someone is trying to make a replica of an object that's already a replica of something else, he reasons that you'd get the genuine article back. Nice try, Fred.
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.
- Interestingly, it's as justified as getting detail from film negatives of a higher resolution than the photograph, since the imp's memory is comparable to the negatives of a photo ("they're too stupid to make things up") and is just projecting the same image larger so the brush marks are smaller and less obscuring compared to the details, and the only detail that can be made out in the reflection is brighter than the rest of the scene. Funny how one of the most realistic examples on the page is from Magitek.
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 The Opal Deception, Foaly does something that deconstructs the entire trope. He zooms in on a suspicious, slightly blurry, patch on Root's chest, recorded by Holly just before she shot him. It resists every effort to clean it up, which is a clue to Foaly that's something's wrong. He goes frame by frame until he reaches one where the bomb's detonate signal briefly replaces the one the device strapped to Root's chest was using to make itself video-invisible.
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.
- Some studies suggest that a 10 year old's testimony might be more reliable in some ways. Children often remember less than adults, but they are also less likely to extrapolate. (i.e. if you give them a list of sleep related words, none of which is "sleep" they might not remember as many of them, but they are less likely to think that the word "sleep" was on the list).
Averted in Animorphs. Ax has set up a device that can record all TV shows at once. When Marco thinks he sees an Andalite on a TV show, he visits Ax and they replay the show revealing that, yep, it's an Andalite. But there's not enough detail for the heroes to figure out who the Andalite is. Marco suggests zooming in (which Ax's device can do) and enhancing the image, but Ax protests that he can't get any better detail than what he has without the original video reel. (Turns out, though, that Tobias realizes that the Andalite isn't anyone they know from the video without enhancement — by looking at the Andalite's deformed tail, instead of the face, where Marco and Ax had been looking.)
- That, and Tobias is Mode Locked as a hawk, a creature with superior eyesight.

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."
- That would be called "zooming in."
Federal agents in 24 seem to do this a lot. Lampshaded once when the Chinese government produces an enhanced photograph of a CTU agent illegally entering a Chinese embassy and Jack Bauer immediately tries to deny its authenticity by saying it was digitally altered, played straight in season seven when the FBI find out Tony Almeida's still alive.
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 an 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. YYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
- CSI New York were able to pull a fingerprint off of a still from a grainy video when the suspect put his hand in front of the lens.
- This tends to be played a lot straighter on the New York & Miami spin-offs, but the original is also guilty of it, albeit to a much lesser degree.
Spoofed 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.
- Perhaps justified in this case, though, given the level of technology present throughout the series.
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.
- It's a very impressive pause, you almost never see a pause like that on standard consumer VC Rs. No, seriously, have you ever tried pausing on a frame with a normal VCR? It doesn't really help in making things clearer.
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.)
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.
  - House usually takes the fancy route to solving any problem, though. Why zoom and pan when the hospital has a cinema? And presumably, he wants to be able to look at the whole image at once, since he's not sure what he's looking for.
- The basic premise is justified in that hospitals working with digital records do require higher resolution screens to show x-rays and other diagnostic images in a way that is actually useful to doctors (is that spot cancer or just a stuck pixel?). While your typical 19" LCD is 1280x1024 and probably has 6bits per color channel (unless its 8bit IPS or PVA), medical LC Ds of a similar size can have resolutions up to 2560x2048 (usually rotated to portrait mode) with 10 bit gray scale. Why P.P.T.H doesn't have the correct medical displays (all of the above methods of showing the diagnostic video would have murdered the accurate display of color - reds are among the first to go) is a mystery for another day.
  - 1. Because that would've ruined the joke? 2. Because the writers probably don't know they exist? 3. Because Cuddy's too cheap to buy any? 4. All of the above?
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 seen 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.
- And again more conventionally in a later episode, "Ascension", where a thumb-sized section of a still from a cop-car surveillance camera is 'enhanced' to reveal a crystal-clear image of a central character, thereby giving the police a vital lead where really they would have been left clueless and she would probably have died. Even more incredible in this example is that Mulder happens to be watching the footage at all - it is literally a random piece of evidence with no known connection to his case at all that his colleague arbitrarily decides he'd be interested in seeing.
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.
  - The end result was just a vaguely humanoid-shaped blob, but it's still one of the few times anybody used the holodeck to do something useful that requires 3D display technology.
  - Except for a an episode where Tuvok did something similar on Star Trek Voyager.
  - The 'remove shadows' thing is easy enough to explain. All the holodeck would have to do calculate light sources where light sources need to be to cast the shadow, and then brighten those areas instead of darkening them. Presumably, it's already programmed to do that, as shadow removal would be useful for all sorts of things, like turning a holophoto into a 3D environment with changing light sources.
  - Geordi also told the computer to assume that whatever the figure was had his approximate height and build, so it wouldn't be too hard to place where the figure was.
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. This is justified, for once, by the fact that Steve is a Mad Scientist. Blowing up an area in a video slightly is probably something he could do during a commercial break.
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.
- In one episode of the original, the tech is able to enhance a decal in a cars window to make out what rental agency it's for. Compare this to an episode a few years earlier, involving an amateur porn tape. The detective notes it's a $2,000 camera, explaining why the tech is able to zoom in a few times and enhance the vic's tattoo. And averted later on when a power glitch displays a frame from the original video on the tape. It's a birthday party at a restaurant, the tech zooms in—once—on the partially obscured logo on the waiter's jacket, to show a blurry image. He runs a filter over it, and gets...a slightly less blurry image. However, it is enough for him to recognize the logo. No, he didn't run it through some database; he simply looked at the logo and remembered what it was for.
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.
- This, like most of the rest of the Back To Earth series, was parodying Blade Runner
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...
Averted in Flash Forward - at the end of the pilot, the FBI finds footage which shows at least one person stayed away during the visions. This footage is from a camera at a stadium in Detroit, and when they zoom in on a part of the footage, it's still just as blocky and pixelated.
- Later played straight when the same footage is "enhanced" enough by the NSA that they can discern a ring on the man's finger. And they're talking about enhancing it even further, to the point where they can identify the ring.
- Keep in mind that this was weeks later, and the NSA mentions that they only were able to get that because the object in question was reflective, so they could get better details off it. Again, it was a video, so it's more plausible that all the fancy algorithms would work.
Would you believe this was actually used in WWE? In 2002 on Raw, Shawn Michaels was brutally attacked in his car in a parking lot. As Triple H kept declaring that he would hunt down whoever did it, Michaels appeared on the Titan Tron with video footage that was then enhanced and then "cleaned up" to reveal Triple H was the attacker. This is what led to the on-camera Michaels/Triple H rivalry that lasted more than three years.
Averted in Alias. Marshal is working to get a better look at the face of a murderer (which is an amnesiac Sydney) from a very poor quality security camera. The inversion takes place in that he's working with a moving image and he's created a rendering program that takes the movement of the face in the image to attempt to reconstruct the face itself to reveal the identity. It takes a day or two to render, and ends up failing due to a virus.
Parodied in 30 Rock. Jack recieves an old home movie of his younger self opening a now-forgotten birthday gift, but the object itself is always out of shot. Curious, he summons a techie to "zoom in and enhance" on the wrapped box to find out what's inside. The tech tells him to just call the original gift giver and ask.
Averted in the second episode of Torchwood; Toshiko is trying to match a CCTV image to a database, but the CCTV image is "too low-res" and that's that.

Video Games

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 again when Bart is going through the school newspaper archives and sees an old picture. He tells Lisa, who is reading over his shoulder, "Zoom in and enhance!" Lisa responds by grabbing the back of Bart's head and pushing his face closer to the screen.
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" on a frame from a VHS 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.
- Oh, come on. He's freaking Batman! He can do anything he wants with SCIENCE!

Webcomics

Web Original

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.
- And somehow it always turns out to be a camera.
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.
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 traffic stop. Cameras usually record an image wider than 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.
According to an urban legend / joke, a photo processing shop received an unusual order. It was a photo of the front of a house, with instructions to "Rotate 180 degrees, so I can see the back of the house."
- or "Please remove this cow so I can see the face of my ancestor!"
Cutting edge face recognition techniques can identify a person from a pool of hundreds with 90% accuracy from a single 12 pixel by 10 pixel mugshot (and reject faces not from the pool). Completely unlike an "Enhance Button", it's good at matching faces while ignoring confounding details like sunglasses, stubble, or partial occlusion, rather than offering any sort of image enhancement.