Technology is advancing. Now, machine learning can enlarge low-resolution images, restoring sharpness that wasn’t there before. A photoshop competitor, image editor “Pixelmator”, is among the first to offer this new feature; super-resolution.
At the end of 2019, Pixelmator announced the launch of its “ML Super Resolution”. For the $60 Pro version of this software, the user can scale an image up to three times its original resolution without defecting the image with blurriness or pixelation.
You can say goodbye to any pixelation from a variety of images, from photography to illustration to text. The results are much better than those delivered by traditional upscaling programs. The overall process is not instant, but it’s fast enough for designers and image editors to use it for work.
In recent years, tech companies such as Google and Nvidia have also developed super-resolution programs. How does it work? The algorithm is trained on a dataset containing pairs of high-resolution and low-resolution images. The program compares this data and generates rules for how the pixels change from image to image. When a low-resolution picture it’s never seen before is uploaded, it predicts what pixels are needed to fill in the gaps and inserts them.
Pixelmator’s creators made the program from scratch so it can be lightweight enough to run on users’ devices. Most research and design programs are so large that users need a hard drive to store them on. Pixelmator is only 5MB in size. Its training dataset is small, with only 15,000 samples needed to create the super-resolution program.
Pixelmator isn’t the first to offer this technology to the public. Some other super-resolution tools include Adobe, LetsEnhance.io and BigJPG.com. However, Pixelmator is said to have a better resolution tool than these other competitors, with more dramatic results.
Check out Pixelmator’s website to see some of ML Super Resolution’s impressive results and comparisons with traditional upscaling techniques like the Lanczos, Bilinear, and Nearest Neighbor tools.
