Upsizing Screen Captures from Your Favourite Anime
I have watched some anime series in my time and i tried to find images from those particular series. But based on the popularity of a certain series, there is only a number of images that you can find and they are not always what you are looking for. I was particularly impressed by certain scenes and I wanted to find images that depict those scenes. The search was not so successful. I tried screen captures, but there were lots of compression artifacts. So I use Photoshop and reshade photo enlargement software to remove the artifacts. You can also use the free online image resizer from Reshade.
Here is a the screen capture that i want to enlarge original size and a selection at 6x zoom:
One can plainly see the poor quality of the image, especially the artifacts around the edges in the image. The artifacts are probably caused because Aisha the Ctarl-Ctarl feline was moving in the anime stream and the video codec couldn’t handle compression and quality of image too well and the former screens in the stream left their impression on our capture. One should probably capture screens when the characters are not moving , to get more quality and a lot less artifacts. You can also see some sort of square pattern in the top left corner that has the same cause described above.
Photoshop offers tools just for our particular problems and these are:
The Despeckle Filter - (Filter->Noise->Despeckle) - Detects the edges in an image (areas where significant color change occurs) and blurs all the selection except those edges. This blurring removes noise while preserving detail. We can use this for the artifacts around the edges.
The Diffuse Filter Anisotropic - (Filter->Stylize->Diffuse) - Shuffles pixels in a selection to soften focus according to the selected option: Normal moves pixels randomly (ignoring color values), Darken Only replaces light pixels with darker ones, and Lighten Only replaces dark pixels with lighter ones. Anisotropic shuffles pixels in the direction of the least change in color. For the artifact.
Fragment - (Filter->Pixelate->Fragment) - Creates four copies of the pixels in the selection, averages them, and offsets them from each other. Fix square patterns by selecting regions of these patterns and applying Fragment on the selection.
Lets use Photoshop’s bicubic smoother on the original image and resize 600% both in height and width. We will get something like the zoomed image shown above.
To remove the square patterns you just use quick mask and select areas in which these pattern appears. Be careful though not to select too close to an edge because it will ruin the smooth transition next to the edge and it will cause an unnatural blur. As a rule of thumb keep your selection a distance of 5 times the breadth of the edge away from that particular edge. It is always a good idea to experiment because different images require different adjustments.
To further improve the image, apply a despeckle on it, the increase it 2 times and apply an Anisotropic Diffuse, then shrink it at half its size.
You can use Surface Blur in conjunction with a mask on the edges to remove the artifacts and preserve the edges
You can see that most of the artifacts and patterns are gone , but the edges have a certain blur. To fix this we can reshade the image after we have shrunk it a few times. and finally we get:
