Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Cameras, Lenses and Shooting gear => Topic started by: hjulenissen on October 14, 2010, 11:08:16 am

Title: Super-resolution
Post by: hjulenissen on October 14, 2010, 11:08:16 am
Anyone here doing super-resolution? It seems to me that many people here are really interested in cramming the most possible resolution from their gear, and recent posts about anti-aliasing filter removal spurred my interest.

I think that super resolution can be compared to old interlaced video camreras. Instead of "properly" filtering in the Nyquist sense, the sensor pixel sites are more like a point-sampler that is shifted in one or more dimensions. If the subject is sufficiently still and the optics can resolve the information, a high-resolution composite can be made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution
Title: Re: Super-resolution
Post by: Bart_van_der_Wolf on October 14, 2010, 11:42:19 am
Anyone here doing super-resolution? It seems to me that many people here are really interested in cramming the most possible resolution from their gear, and recent posts about anti-aliasing filter removal spurred my interest.

I've done some, but more for testing purposes. It's a processing intensive operation, and requires a number of very slightly displaced images of stationary (relative to the sequence time) subjects, but it does work. It's a procedure that's done in Astronomy (search for "drizzle") to boost resolution, but there are some tools around for those who need to squeeze a little bit more resolution from their sensor. One can try the demo version of PhotoAcute Studio (http://www.photoacute.com/studio/) and see how it functions.

Cheers,
Bart
Title: Re: Super-resolution
Post by: hjulenissen on October 14, 2010, 01:02:47 pm
If you want a wide-angle landscape, there are some interesting differences between doing super-resolution and stitching panoramas:
*SR is more or less limited by the lense resolution (?), while stitching N photos will give an apparent N-fold increase in lense resolution.
*When doing SR, each image will be a sort of full image in its own right. Meaning that single "bad" images can simply be left out, and any number of slightly offset images can be included
*SR does not need expensive riggs for panning/tilting, but sharp optics and AA filter removal

-h
Title: Re: Super-resolution
Post by: nass on October 14, 2010, 01:36:31 pm
Not for landscapes, no, but on the obligatory moon effort (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jingleslenobel/4940423735/) I used a freebie called Registax (http://www.astronomie.be/registax/) to combine 9 images and use that to obtain more resolution. It did a great job.
Title: Re: Super-resolution
Post by: Luis Argerich on October 14, 2010, 04:03:03 pm
I wonder if there is a freeware app to do SR.
I've used DeepSkyStacker to do drizzle in astrophotography and it's quite a good resource. SR combined with NR by averaging  needs many many images but it's worth the effort for some special cases.
I only know photoacute for SR but is commercial. Anyone knows other alternatives?

Title: Re: Super-resolution
Post by: nightfire on October 14, 2010, 05:05:27 pm
I only know photoacute for SR but is commercial. Anyone knows other alternatives?

The Photoacute guys give free licenses to those who help them create profiles for camera/lens combinations not yet in their list.