The Mac Gyver example's description has a flaw that just bugs me:
- In one episode of Mac Gyver this was coupled with some superficially realistic-sounding but ultimately ludicrous Techno Babble: "Create a bitmap. Now increase the Z-axis while holding the X and Y axis steady." (Note that this essentially implies that the image is a hologram, not a photograph.)
The highlighted portion isn't technically correct, when you think about it logically. Merely mentioning a Z axis does not automatically imply a 3d source.
First of all, think about how a computer screen draws an image; the pixels are drawn based on a modified Cartesian Coordinate System (the origin is usually at the top left of the screen with the y-axis inverted). Now, when you add a third axis, Z, it runs perpendicular to the other two axes, i.e. forward and backward from the face of the monitor.
By telling the tech to "increase the Z Axis while holding the x and y steady," he's essentially telling the tech to zoom in while keeping the focal point centered. Either that or he's telling the tech to bring the monitor closer...
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Murder of a cop on a routine traffic stop? The example just said about using CSI techniques to solve the murder. Was the killer arrested (or rather shot dead)?
I got my political views from reddit and that's bad
Not A Subversion fixes. I went through and cleared up a lot of the places where people said the trope was "averted" when it was in fact a subversion.
A subversion means it looks like they're going to use the trope and then they do something else. If somebody asks a tech to "enhance the image" and the tech replies "Uh, you can't actually do that, dude," then that's a subversion. You thought they were going to have a magic enhance button, but they played it realistically.
An aversion would just mean the thing didn't happen at all and wasn't even referenced. They look at security footage, the quality is garbage, and they just accept it for what it is and move along without comment.
Remember, aversions are not normally notable unless the trope is so nearly universal that an exception stands out just by being different. (For example, sound in space is so common that a movie with no sound effects in space is surprising for its absence.)
So I realized that a lot of these "enhance button" scenes show complicated computer animations, which must have been animated by people who know how computers and imaging software is actually used.
They're selling their souls...
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I know that many professional people use the computer keyboard a lot, but not exclusively. The actors never seem to use a mouse/touch pad. Surely in a lot of their actions when enhancing and zooming it would be quicker and easier than just the keys?
It's unfortunate, but you do what you do to pay the bills.
Oh hai TV Tropes
The Lytro camera with it's "light field capture technique" allows refocusing an image on any point after the fact. This involves recording a lot more data than a regular photo of similar resolution, and uses a rather more complex file format.
Arstechnica has covered the Lytro technology in a couple of articles:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/10/lytros-new-light-field-camera-lets-you-focus-after-you-take-a-picture.ars
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/lytros-quirky-camera-is-equal-bits-awkward-fun.ars
That seems nice but from what I can tell it just takes the same picture multiple times at once at different focus points, allowing you to choose where in the picture you want it focused later. It's still not going to be able to "enhance" a 240p security video into a 1080p 3d hologram or whatever.
Well let's see if anyone can remember the show, because it was so ridiculous it had me in tears. Think it might have been Numb3rs.
Obviously it was a crime-investigation-type show, and if memory serves the murder took place at some rich beach house. They had a picture of a woman lying face down in a bath tub with the water pouring, complete with bubbles. And so, naturally, the magical computer guy manages to zoom in, get it to crystal clear quality, rotate the picture's depth, then claim that they could reconstruct the face based off the reflections off the rush of colorless bubbles. And, again, it manages to wave a few green lines over with little pixels-unblurring effect, and they get a beautifully crisp image of the girls face. All done in a couple seconds with algorithms and science!
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Interessting thing: Even the Enhance Button seems to bow to narrative casuality. Recently (at least where I live, we're a bit behind with the epsiodes) in an episode of CSI: NY (The episode with the vampires) they had a photograph on which the potential weapon was pictured, yet (as that would have made the episode several minutes shorter) they couldn't enhance it right away. Instead, we get a quote along the lines of this: "Try and download a program from the internet to enhance it."
"Undeveloped film?" Pretty sure that's not what you guys mean. Maybe you mean the negatives, which are different.
Obviously this thing works in some cases when there is enough residual information still available even though it is blurred. On Forensic Files you can see some interesting examples on how images are improved, with some stunning results. It surely won't help if the image is far too deteriorated, but obviously there is a way to compensate a certain degree of information deterioration.