History Main / EnhanceButton

* ''Series/{{Spooks}}'' goes back and forth on this. One episode shows MI5 taking an image captured by a spy satellite, "enhancing" it, and rotating it to see the face of one person and the ''shape of his sunglasses''.

Sometimes a technician will point out this impossibility but nevertheless be able to "clean up" the image with his [[HollywoodHacking mad computer skillz]], with an appropriate HandWave or {{technobabble}} ("I applied a Fast Fourier Transformation algorithm to the vector flux capacitor") to explain how he did it. This is based off a RealLife technique where you can ''guess'' what's in the picture based on the position and color of the pixels, the way you might be able to guess the words of a missing page in a book based on the text of the surrounding pages. This kind of thing is good for guessing things from a limited range of possibilities, like license plate numbers, but not much else.

* The ''Anime/GhostInTheShellStandAloneComplex'' episode "Interceptors" had almost an exact reference to the similar scene from ''Film/BladeRunner'' mentioned below; the terminology used by the voice-activated photo-enhancement program is even identical, with Togusa saying lines like "Enhance 32 to 50" just as Deckard does. [[PlayingWithATrope The enhancing does bupkis for the investigation.]] Togusa's EurekaMoment comes after hours of pointless enhancing when he comes to a picture of a mirror [[spoiler:that doesn't reflect a ''camera.'' This is when he realizes that the pictures were taken with the (minimally-enhanced) subject's ''eyes.'' Someone lo-jacked the subject with {{Nanomachines}}!]]

* In ''WesternAnimation/BigHero6'', Hiro's friends show him some security footage from Krei's "Project: Silent Sparrow", [[spoiler: and Professor Callaghan attacking Krei after the teleportation portal fails, evidently killing the pilot.]] Hiro zooms in on a shot of [[spoiler:the pilot]], and discovers [[spoiler:the name "Callaghan" printed on her helmet, revealing that she was Professor Callaghan's daughter and that he was seeking revenge against Krei for her death.]]

** In an {{aversion}}, Dredd's defense counsel maintains that CCTV footage of Dredd supposedly murdering someone is too low-res to be admitted into evidence. They point out that his face cannot be seen at the angle in question, he never speaks, and his uniform could be a forgery.

* ''Literature/ArtemisFowl'''s title character uses the C Cube to enhance low quality video into much higher quality one. It's {{Handwaved}} as fairy technology; a previous book suggests it works by removing impurities in the wire that transmitted the footage (which wouldn't do squat for the digital signal itself, but whatever.)

* [[ZigZaggedTrope Zig-Zagged]] in ''Literature/{{Congo}}'': The hunt to enhance a piece of footage that displays one of the [[KillerGorilla killer gorillas]] storming the first ERTS camp requires multiple specialised computer programs, some of which need to be run to counteract a degradation of the footage that the previous program unwillingly creates, and all of which need a long amount of time. Ross can work the programs faster and more efficiently than anyone. The resulting picture is still bad enough that Travis at first thinks Ross found a rookie programmer's EasterEgg. But it's still just good enough to convince Travis that Ross can be the "[[TheWormGuy console hot-dogger]]" for the second expedition.
* {{Hand Wave}}d in ''Literature/DirtyMartini'' by J. A. Konrath, where a tech-savvy police grunt drops some TechnoBabble to describe how they were able to filter and blow up a grainy picture until it became legible.

* In one of the ''Literature/TomSwift'' 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. [[LampshadedTrope Lampshaded]] in that they discuss that the computer is pretty much just making stuff up to fill the missing data.

* {{Averted|Trope}} in ''Series/{{Alias}}'': Marshal is working to get a better look at a murderer's face from a very poor-quality security camera. He creates a rendering program that takes the movement of the face in the image and attempts to reconstruct the face from there. It takes a day or two to render, and [[PhlebotinumBreakdown ends up failing due to a virus]].

* {{Parodied|Trope}} in ''Series/TheBigBangTheory'' when Howard and Raj find a drone crashed in Howard's backyard and use footage from its onboard camera to try and return it to its owner. They spot a pin on the owner's lapel in the video, and Raj tells Howard to zoom in on it. Howard picks up his laptop and, making a "zooming" sound effect with his mouth, shoves it into Raj's face.

* {{Parodied|Trope}} in ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', when viewing some fuzzy CCTV. One character asks another to zoom in on an element, and after being told no:

* ''Series/TheColbertReport'' loves to skewer this trope, often in combination with a BatDeduction, as in [[http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/361889/october-12-2010/tip-wag---peabody-public-schools--andy-rooney---ground-zero-mosque-design this sketch]]. Fundamentally, they just make up whatever the enhanced image looks like (usually something ridiculous) and photoshop it in.

** In "Two of a Kind" (a crossover with ''Series/CrossingJordan''), the boys use four separate photos of a crime in progress to end up with a perfect 3D simulation of the room, revealing the face of a female culprit which wasn't anywhere in the recorded material. There's a slight HandWave that the computer "extrapolated" the new information from what they already had, but it's not shown how it did so.

* ''VideoGame/Cyberpunk2077'' has its own high tech version with the "Braindance editor". Semi-{{Justified}} in that you only get what the recorder's cyberware enhancements picked up, but you can still move around in it to view different angles, and get data the recorder didn't notice, and even download whole files when the recorder only saw a single screenshot.

* A running gag in ''Website/CollegeHumor'''s ''Kingpin Katie'' series is people saying "Computer: Enhance" as they perform completely normal functions like zooming in on a picture on their smartphone or entering something into a web search.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheClevelandShow'', Cleveland Junior is able to zoom and enhance a Website/YouTube video.

* The first season finale of ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans'' has Slade deliver a recorded threat, then it turns out, ''bank'' on the Titans being able to see something reflected in a metal surface, which Beast Boy calls "squiggly lines. Way informative." before a few keystrokes refine it into a legible sign, which (this part is realistic, if unnecessarily showy) inverts horizontally into where they need to go.

*** Bizarrely, played straight later in the same episode when they zoom in on a ''different'' blurry photograph and subject it to an "enhance factor of 10."

*** Bizarrely, played straight later in the same episode when they zoom in on a *different* blurry photograph and subject it to an "enhance factor of 10."

* A character does this ''by hand'' in a ''Literature/BabysittersClub'' 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.

* ''Series/{{Castle}}'':

* Parodied in Creator/MelBrooks' ''Film/HighAnxiety''. 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!" It's oddly more realistic than most examples, because it's from a medium-format camera, which even back then could easily take 150 megapixel photos -- the ''real'' unrealistic bit is where he can get photo paper that big.

* A first season episode of ''Series/{{Numb3rs}}'' [[DeconstructedTrope deconstructs this trope]]. They are able to "zoom in" on a poor-resolution image, but Charlie and Amita explain that what they're seeing isn't actually information contained in the original image (in fact, Amita explicitly shows them that just magnifying the image accomplishes nothing because "the information's just not there"), but rather a predictive tool that extrapolates from the existing data to fill in the missing information as best it can.

* In ''{{Film/Next}}'', FBI agents zoom in and enhance a grainy frame of CCTV footage enough to get a VIN number from an SUV.

* {{Averted|Trope}} in an episode of ''Series/BronBroen'' when the Swedish cops are looking at a supermarket security camera video of a suspect. Saga asks if they can enhance the image to get a recognisable face, but their tech guy explains that the original quality of the recording is too poor to get anything more.

The most unrealistic cases will even allow you to change the camera angle, see through or around things, or pick up tiny reflections in unlikely places. They also have an incredible zoom, which creates new pixels rather than simply enlarging them. Also cringe-inducing is where the source image is an old, low resolution VHS tape in a gas station security cam.