Zoom & Enhance

Barley, a dog, is photographed curled up into a bean. Due to excessive digital zoom, the image looks somewhat smoothed and processed compared to a crisp photograph.

I’ve never quite been able to persuade my brain that a low-resolution image has within it as little information as it actually does. Whenever I see something with a low pixel count, an irrational part of my brain insists that the image is somehow just fine, and that all I need to do is remove this mask that’s getting in the way. It’s like my brain thinks the world is trying to trick it with a translucent checkerboard shower curtain. Seeing what happens when machines try to “upscale” noisy images to smooth them out is a useful (if temporary) remedy to this digital delusion. There really is less information there to begin with.