Ancient Effin History! Very first digital photos at Disney World

I had picked up Topaz's Gigapixel on an add-on offer, and I originally intended to try it out on some heavily cropped photos to see how much better resolution I could pull out of some shots by running Gigapixel then resizing back. But then a second idea popped up.

I had taken my very first digital camera, a Mavica FD91 floppy disk camera, to Disney World - I knew nothing about digital and had only had a computer for a few years - my CRT monitor had a crazy high 800x600 resolution, and those Mavica photos were 1 full MP - I knew I only needed 640x480 to fill much of that screen, so I set the camera to that resolution and fired away. I mean, who's ever going to need more resolution than that?

Yeah, as I said, I knew nothing at the time, and was still shooting film cameras until 2004, so the digital was an experiment - nothing that was going to be a full-time keepsake memory. Going back now and looking at those original 640x480, highly compressed JPGs shot with a video lens and a 1/3" CCD sensor - no real control over aperture, ISO, etc, they look like thumbnails on modern LCD screens. I wondered just what Gigapixel could do if pushed to the extreme. Could those thumbnails yield ANYTHING? Even just trying to get them up to 1000 to 1200 pixels on the long side and see if you could still tell what the photo was! No miracles of course, but I was happy I could SOMEWHAT improve those tiny thumbnail originals into slightly bigger, more usable small shots - still nothing that could print or fill a 4k screen, but I was surprised you could get a clear idea what the photo was.

Here are some of those old Mavica photos - just to reminisce:

Epcot Canada pavilion, 2002:



Magic Kingdom station, 100 year anniversary of Walt Disney, 2002:


France pavilion, Epcot, 2002:


Wilderness Lodge 2002:


Inside the Contemporary Hotel, 2002:


Hippo, 2003:


Inside the Wilderness Lodge, 2002:


Odyssey, Flower & Garden festival, 2002:


I've got older photos from Disney, going back to the 1970s, on film, but these were my very first digital photos from Disney...In hindsight, would have been nice to have used the full 1MP available, but with the CCD sensor and the video-quality lens, they probably wouldn't have been that much better anyway!

 

Impressive. I haven't used the AI versions of the Topaz apps, so I'll have to give them a shot. Their JPEG-to-RAW AI processor sounds like something that could help scanned film images.

 

That's another project I'd like to try - I have some scanned film shots, and the scans were OK, but they really can't be processed at all - just very basic contrast and color. The JPG to RAW might provide more flexibility to fine tune scans. I did try Gigapixel on some older film scans and did get some improvement in resolution too - my scans were at 2560x1920 and I used Gigapixel for a 4x up-rez, then resized back to the original 5MP. But it couldn't really do anything for noise or grain in the shots, because it doesn't register as 'noise' and any imperfections in the original such as scratches, hairs, etc are still there.

With those tiny 640x480, the most I could reasonably uprez them was around 1800 pixels - and some it just didn't have enough details at that level. I tried a few at 2560x1920, going for a 5MP size - but with very few exceptions it was a bridge too far. But definitely much better at 1400-1800 pixels across than the tiny little 640 pixel original! I had some shots from Las Vegas and New Orleans that I didn't bother to bring a film camera for, so those were the rare few that I didn't have any duplicates of (Vegas was for a work convention in 2000, and New Orleans was passing through for a friend's wedding). It's nice that I was able to get some salvaged 1.5 - 2MP versions of those old Mavica shots!

 

I have been messing about with both Sharpen AI and Gigapixel AI on some more older photos - this time, some more recent 5MP, 7MP, & 14MP cameras...for Gigapixel, to see what kind of sharpness improvements and detail improvements I could get from older photos that were a little soft, and for Sharpen AI to see how well it could correct older shots that had some motion blur, or slight out-of-focus blur. The software is pretty impressive - both of them. Some more examples of each...

Sharpen AI:

A meercat being fed...just not optimally sharp, taken with 55-210mm el-cheapo lens:


Run through Sharpen AI, Motion blur, standard, and cropped differently:


Original tiger closeup, mostly softer just because of shooting through that thick, fingerprint covered glass:


Run through Sharpen AI in Out-of-Focus mode, standard:


Definite motion blur, not panned well and not enough shutter speed:


Slightly different crop, but mostly run through Sharpen AI in Motion Blur mode, very blurry:


Here's one using Gigapixel AI - took the original:


Then ran it through Gigapixel's Low Resolution mode, at 4x uprez...then resized back down with a slightly tighter and larger final crop: