I don’t know about you, but being in Covid-19 lockdown has given me time to go through old holiday and family photos. Older digital photos are OK, but when you were shooting with a whopping 1–3MB digital image back in the day, it’s not quite print-worthy these days. So how can you enlarge old photos without losing quality?

When it comes to these old photos, there are a few programs you can use to sharpen and denoise them. They do a great job, but what about increasing the size and resolution? The below image I was able to take from 1.37MB to 137MB by using Topaz Gigapixel AI. I can’t exactly load the full upscaled image resolution here, but you can still see the difference in noise and sharpness.

Enlarging your old photos with Gigapixel AI

You are increasing the resolution in your images not just enlarging pixels. According to Topaz, “Most upscaling algorithms don’t know how to accurately fill in missing pixels, so you end up with blocky low-quality results.”

This is great for already moderately high-resolution images, smoothing them out and adding in more detail. On old compressed images, it can removed JPEG artifacts, reduce noise and sharpen. It’s is quite incredible.

I have always adored this image I snapped in Bali, years ago, but it was quite small. Now thanks to Gigapixel AI, my Macaque Monkey babe is worthy of a print. So next time you are going through some older digital images, perhaps rethink their value. Now you can easily enlarge old photos without losing quality.