Replying to: Ralph (Developer)zoom enhance

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnhanceButton

Enhance Button

“If TV Science was more like real science”

Zapp: Why’s it still blurry?!
Kif: That’s all the resolution we have. Making it bigger doesn’t make it clearer.
Zapp: It does on CSI: Miami.
— Futurama

A staple of any crime drama, the “Enhance Button” is a computer function that allows you to turn a tiny, blurred, or grainy image into a clear, unmistakable piece of evidence. It’s nearly always heralded by someone standing next to the computer ordering it (or the technician operating it) to “Enhance.”
This allows characters to glean information beyond what the picture itself actually contains. As such, most Enhance Button functions are impossible in real life. The Enhance Button derives from legitimate Real Life “image enhancement” techniques that allow you to change things like colors or saturation, or compare frames of a video, which will create a clearer image than before. But there’s still a limit to what it can do, and it can only work with the data in the photo. The Enhance Button adds data. The worst cases will even allow you to change the camera angle, see through or around things, or pick up reflections in unlikely places. They also have an incredible zoom, which creates new pixels rather than simply enlarging them.

Sometimes a technician will point out this impossibility but nevertheless be able to “clean up” the image with his mad computer skillz, with an appropriate Hand Wave as to how he did it. This is based off a Real Life technique where you can guess what’s in the picture based on the position and color of the pixels, the way you might be able to guess the words of a missing page in a book based on the text of the surrounding pages. This kind of thing is good for guessing things from a limited range of possibilities, like license plate numbers, but not much else.
The Enhance Button is a common part of the Rewind, Replay, Repeat sequence, where some kind of investigator is looking through pictures or video footage for evidence and gets to spot a clue that’s not initially obvious. It’s often also got Facial Recognition Software and an Omniscient Database to help identify individuals. Interestingly, the investigator rarely uses the Button himself; he has to order the techie on the computer to do it, hence the ubiquitous command, “Enhance”. Conversely, the techie rarely enhances on his own initiative, even though he knows the software better than anyone and can guess what his boss wants him to do.

It’s such a ritual that it’s not uncommon to lampshade or parody the phenomenon, with a tech-illiterate investigator who expects this to work, or with a clearly impossible enhance button that wraps around to Rule of Funny.