Dear people,
Recently, I got a Serial Experiments Lain work of mine deleted here because of "poor image quality." The original wall is still up here:
(Full View please)
One of the things the mod said, was: "Just filtering a blurry image doesn't make it any better. There are ways you can make smaller images bigger and better, it's called vectoring, or tracing with the pen tool."
Here's where I want your opinion. I generally scale small-sized footage using Genuine Fratals 6.0 Professional (Photoshop), a fractal-based scaler, as the name says, which is, far as I know, the best in the industry. I used it to upscale the cpu-board image some (one of the used image that was said to be of too low quality). I also vectored the image (highest settings) with Vector Magic 1.14. I put both results side by side on this example (upscaled to the left left, vectored to the right).
Clearly, as I expected, the vectored image is of decidedly lower quality, as a quick zoom shows it's much blurrier than the fractal-upscaled image on the left.
Another image said too be of too low quality, was Lain's eye-view. Same deal: original eye to the left left, vectored to the right:
Here the vectored image clearly loses out to the original as well. It can't keep up -- not even closely -- with the gradient on the iris of the image on the left.
These results do not surprise me, to be honest. Vectoring is not a magic wand that can be wielded to add detail to a low-quality image, or be used to magically clean it up (at least not at the expense of much detail).
Personally, I don't find either start image to be of particular low quality to begin with. But, assuming that they are, and that I'm missing a vital technique in my Photoshop repertoire, I'd like to hear how the quality of those two image could be improved much beyond the way I've done. Maybe I'm using a crappy vectoring tool? (Admittedly, haven't too much experienced with vectoring). Maybe I'm using crappy setting on it? Or maybe I'm not doing it right in another way. Fanart-wise, I tend to work with what we got: if no high-res material is available, I generally just use what's available to me; upscale it nicely, maybe, perhaps do some denoise, etc. But beyond that, I think there's not a whole lot else you can do. So, if there's something I'm missing, I'd like to hear about it, please.
Thanks.