Okay, here goes. I didn’t spend much time on this, so far better results are possible, I didn’t have time to work out the best alignment points and settings, and these are from Tech prints, so there are some RGB alignment issues in the source. I also used raw scans, so the damage and dirt is still there, it would be better had they been cleaned up first.
I found a scene I have a few scans of. The scans are all in 1080P.
I loaded the scans into elastix to roughly align them, then exported to autostakkert to stack and drizzle the images.
The source frame was this. (right click to view at full 1080P)
After a (very rough) stacking, we get this result at 1080P
You can see most of the noise has disappeared and more detail revealed in the trooper and in the sand patterns behind him.
So to compare a before and after stacking with a close-up of our favourite trooper, see if you can work out which is the before and which is the after…
Some Split-screen compares: (right click and view the image to see them at full Rez)
The next step is to enable drizzling to try and get a super-resolution thing happening. This normally would mean a lot of experimenting to find the best settings, these were just a first guess, it could be made better.
So to scale our original frames to a stacked and super-rezzed 4K image (4096 pixels wide vs 1920 pixels wide) we get this:
The image on the left is the drizzled ‘super resolution’ image, on the right, is the original frame upscaled to the same size in Photoshop’
Finally, a full 4096 pixel wide image created via stacking and drizzling the 1080P source scans:
Unfortunately IMGUR reduces the image quality quite a bit, so I have linked to the file instead.
Anyway, I have probably bored everyone shitless now, even though that is a quick example, not a great one by any means, but I thought I’d share the kind of thing I’ve been messing with. As I mentioned, I’ve been doing it with astrophotography for many years, and those programs and techniques can be quite useful for image processing in general.