Change to a higher resolution on a pic

[GMP]

I have a pic. It's low resolution and I wonder if I can improve it so you don't see the pixel squares when zooming in. Can this be smoothed out?

[rich2005]

Give some details of this image, size in pixels, RGB or Indexed, photograph or a drawing ... anything that might be relevent.

However,

Gimp is a raster (bitmap) editor. An image is made up from those pixels. Zoom in far enough and you see the pixels. That is not the way images are normally viewed. Some types of image, typically pixel art will always look 'blocky'

Depending on the image there are smoothing filters, the gmic plugin has several. Effectively you blur the image. The cure might be worse than the original.

edit: An example: https://i.imgur.com/kAG8G2g.mp4 Small, noisy photo, smoothing using the gmic Anisotropic smoothing filter.

[denzjos]

You can try this : https://www.reshade.net
Enlarged pictures look sharp and smooth, but if you zoom in, you always see pixels. That's how a digital image or photo is built. Nothing to do about this.
Some information : https://edgy.app/new-ai-system-to-turn-l...resolution

[GMP]

The original pic is 720x480. Yet the face is fairly small in the pic, so when I zoom in to an eye it's 10 pixils long. I tried this online upscale and chose 8x

https://www.aiseesoft.com/image-upscaler/

With this, the eye pixils are now 40 instead of 10, so this is what I was looking for, now I don't see the sharp edges of the pixils.

I tried GMIC Antialias with the Amplitude adjustment and it just blurred it. Maybe I could get good results by playing with it more. Can GIMP or GMIC raises the number of pixils like the Upscaler did?

I tried Reshade after watching the tutorial video first. The initial result I got wasn't very good, the 2nd result was pretty good and actually better than the online Upscaler. I zoomed in  and see that with Reshade there were close to 80 pixils on the eye, instead of 40 with the online Upscaler and 10 with my original pic

Thanks everyone for the excellent advice and guidance as usual.

[rich2005]

The question is about up-scaling an image rather than improving the quality of a small image.

By all means use an on-line conversion but that does not give you much insight as to Gimp functions.

The Gimp Scale with No-Halo interpolation has a measure of built in smoothing and might be sufficient, however again using gmic filters

Using this; The eye is about 10 pix across

   

Then gmic Upscale[edge] x8  + a little gmic Sharpen(Gold-Meinel)

   

and the inevitable 60 second video:  https://i.imgur.com/URdP83a.mp4

Edit: a reminder, Image viewers (especially Windows ) and web browsers do smooth an image, Gimp shows true details.