: Looking for service to upscale/resize art from 480p to 1080p widescreen I've got some older preexisting artwork in 4:3 480p format, and I want to upscale it to 1080p widescreen, and/or make

@Rivera951

There are a couple of tricks for upscaling graphics.

The first one is to mirror tile it:

1) change the size of your canvas (not image) so that it is double its original width and height
2) mirror the graphic layer horizontally, so that you have filled the width of the canvas
3) merge the original layer and the mirrored layer into one
4) mirror the graphic layer vertically, so that you have filled the height of the canvas
5) merge the original and mirrored layers

Note: now you have a 1440x960 image.

6) do steps 1–5 again

Note: now you have a 2880x1920 image.

7) change the canvas size to 1920x1080 anchored at the center

Note: now you have a 1920x1080 HD image, with excess hanging off the canvas as bleed or available for future use.

Although the image is not exactly the same, it has very much the same flavor and it fills the canvas.

The second trick is to interlace the image, by slicing it into 1 pixel tall strips and laying those out over a black background with a pixel between them, so you go from the top: 1 line of image, 1 line of black, 1 line of image, one line of black. That results in a double height image that has a remarkably similar flavor. But that won’t get you from SD to HD even if you do it horizontally as well. You can try going 1 line of image and 2 lines of black and then mirror the whole thing twice. You can also interlace the image with a mirrored version of itself.

Your other two options are:


have an artist use your original as a reference to create a 4K master that looks identical except it is higher-res, and use a down scaled HD version in your game
buy all-new stock art textures in 4K and use the down scaled in your game — this will likely be cheaper than hiring an artist.


The reason I say 4K is for future-proofing and Retina-proofing. We are already in the 4K era and 4K is the Retina version of an HD image. So unless you want to be back in this exact position in a few years, make sure only to invest in 4K artwork today. Ideally you would do all of your artwork as though the game is 4K and use down scaled versions for HD. Then a future HD-to-4K upgrade to your game only involves coding. Your artwork will already be ready.

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@Cugini998

The bad news is that, as others have pointed out, there is no way to upscale an image without losing resolution. Converting it to a wide screen format is even more difficult since there is nothing there.

The best solution would be to re-create the file (if you don't have the original PSD files anymore, you should start from scratch). If that's not an option, then:

Photoshop does have algorithms to improve the quality of an image when resizing and fill in the missing pixels as best it can. What's more, content aware could be used to fill out the missing pixels and bring the image to 1080. Adding some Sharpness (Unsharp Mask) can also make the image seem crisper.



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From what I know, there have been improvements made to both the content aware fill tool and the resizing algorithms in the newest version of PS so get a trial of that for the best results.

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@Jessie844

There are no services that I'm aware of but as mentioned, you can always hire a graphic designer/illustrator to recreate the art, or you can purchase software that specifically does this type of upscaling but at the end of the day, even that software can only do as good of a job as what you have to start with. Also, as you are aware, that 4:3 format will be cropped when upscaled to a 16:9 (1080p) format. Just something to think about.

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