This is a long shot, but here goes. Someone sent me a couple of tiny images (100 x 75 res, 22K). Just about useless because of the pixellation if I try to enlarge them enough to view. Does anyone have any suggestions - software or technique? I'm not expecting anything dramatic, but I'd like to see who is in them!

[rdhir]

its unlikely you would have success. The information has been thrown away when the shot was resized. Check and see if your friend has the larger originals and can send them to you. There are "fractal" tools which pros use for blowing up photos while retaining quality, but I doubt they could do anything for you. They don't recreate the lost information, they just work out something that won't look too bad, so you'll get a good looking texture, but no facial detail.

Cheers

Rajiv

Yep, those pics are so small resolutions and compression makes them near useless, except maybe on a camera phone screen.
The previous guy is correct, fractal algorythms can provide enhancement. Do an interweb search.
If you have Photoshop, you can upscale in 10% increments. The bicubic process is quite good though dont expect miracles. Post process editing could bring back some detail in sharpness using the High Pass filter on a copy layer and setting the layer blend mode to Soft Light.

Old computing term- "rubbish in, rubbish out"!

[tomson]

Have used Genuine Fractals for upsampling images but it's very very dependant on the original image - so you're not going to get good results from such a tiny source file. Once the image is that small any detail is lost and is unrecoverable.

Thanks guys. I wasn't expecting much from this - think the originals might have been taken on a camera phone and compressed for transmission - nut I'll try your suggestions. Might come in useful in some other context. By the way, it used to be GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out!