The quality you can get with film never ceases to amaze me. I think the Oppenheimer movie poster was shot on film then scanned digitally, and the final image is like 11k pixels wide. There was also a 1980's music clip I saw the other day on YouTube that was labelled as remastered in 4k or something, and it looked great for a remaster. Turns out it was simply re-scanned with modern tools and since the original film was so crisp it was all that needed to be done. No AI enhancement bullshit and all that.
Rescanning with modern tools is the exact definition of a remaster - Going back to the original 'master' copy and using modern techniques to produce a newer, better version :-)
@PugJesus@lemmy.world do you have the source for this image? I'd love to find out more.
This version has been noticeably digitally altered, someone has used a clone or heal tool in the corners:
I assume the original photo or film must have holes or marks on it, they would be interesting to see.
I also have an (unconfirmed) suspicion that this image may have been a black and white photo that has been digitally colourised. It can't have been fully AI colourised as the flowers on the lady's dress are too perfectly coloured (even where they are hidden in folds or shadow). Alas the chroma of the flowers is shaped in perfect circles of pink, even overlapping black areas of the dress (where it's otherwise coloured slightly blue), making me suspect a round brush tool in an image editor:
I can't be 100% certain, there might be some other explanation for this chroma patterning. It's not JPEG (that quantises in square blocks, not circles). Might be some weird optical effects or multiple layers of JPEG on top of each other causing gaussian filtering (if you apply box filters repetitively at different offsets then you eventually approximate a gaussian). Not to mention that the version I downloaded is a .webp (and I have no experience with that format), I suspect Lemmy might have converted it upon upload.