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Dagur & Nótt
Photo & Video Enhancement and Painting SErvices
Using A.I.-based Image Upscaling & A.I. Photo Painting, along with manual (by hand) digital painting, you can see how this original, low-resolution photo can quickly be turned from this...

...into this.
(On Desktop Systems, click either image, then move the mouse to zoom in and see more details)


Have a Family Photo, Business Portrait, or Band Promo-shot that needs fixing, colourizing, or just a more interesting, professional, or artistic vibe?
Check out some of the possibilities here, starting with a low-resolution promo shot taken in the late 80's, for Canadian Pop Music Icons, Spoons.
A good shot, but you'll see (if you mouse-over on Desktop) that it's a very low-resolution download from the internet: highly pixelated, especially up close (no good for print). Also, it's from a creased and folded photo, which clearly needs fixing. Beyond that, a painted feel could create drama and expression...so let's give it a try.
(Permission granted from spoonsmusic.inc to use this image)

First thing's first, we need to upscale the image a lot...but conventional upscaling algorithms (like photoshop uses) leave you with a blurred, smeared, or still pixelated image. We use an advanced A.I. based upscaling process from Nvidia, which utilizes their high-end RTX2080 video cards to create a clean image with minimal pixelation, at many times the resolution. Click to zoom in and really see the difference...
Amazing, right?
Now, of course, the A.I. can't fix ALL the problems in one stroke (yet!).
The process still leaves the folds and crease lines in the picture and adds a few faint "squiggles" that need to be fixed up as well. This is where the cleanup stage comes in...

Here, we've gone in and manually touched up the creases and squiggles, removed the imperfect framing, as well as the yellow cast, and brightened the image.
This should already be a good enough quality for a poster, and if that's all you need done, great! This process takes less than half an hour, and won't cost much at all. (Approximately $50 can.)
But if you want to take it further into the artistic realm, then we need to go to the next step: colour!

Here, we've used yet another A.I. based process from Magix, usually reserved for use with video (in their high-end video post-production
suite, Vegas Pro 18.) But here we've used it on a single frame, to colourize this picture. The plug-in makes a solid guess as to what the colours should be, giving decent results in less than a minute...but to be honest, it's usually only about half right.
In this case, the blue jeans weren't blue, and only parts of the hair were coloured correctly, so we made some adjustments afterward in photoshop. But doing this by hand, from scratch, would have taken much longer.
Now, we move onto the process of digitally painting the image, again using a combination of methods...

Starting with the above image, we move onto a different type of process: virtual painting. Here we're starting very subtly, using custom settings for virtual brush type, size, and strength, brush stroke-direction, canvass texture, and many other variables. In this case, we used settings with small brush sizes (maintaining the detail) as a base, but could easily have gone more obvious. From here on, personal style and taste start to come into play...

Here we used a completely different intelligent digital paint process, which focuses on three-dimensional textures and visible "paint". It produces multiple, editable layers, from the small, medium, and large brush strokes, to brush edges, to spatter, etc.
Those layers are blended and manually edited/faded on certain areas of certain layers by eye. The example here uses an obvious, but still not overly extreme approach.

Here's a much "wilder" approach, going far "outside the lines" for something dramatic and expressive.
If you prefer, you can let us know your stylistic preferences, or send us a painting that you'd like it to look more similar to, and we'll go from that.
You'll notice a snazzy band logo and crest added here (for Spoons 40th Anniversary) which brings us to another service we provide: logo and graphic design, for album covers, corporate use, t-shirts, whatever.
See below for links to contact information, or to learn about our other services.

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