Image leveling techniques

So, you search for San Francisco on Google Images. You find a thumbnail you like and decide you want to print it at 50x50cm. Naturally, when you zoom in, the image turns into a blurry mess. Does a solution exist? Is there actually a program out there that can fix this and bring an image back to life? Because graphic designers keep telling me it’s impossible to sharpen it. Come on. There is software for everything these days—surely there isn't a gap in the market for this? Any ideas? Thanks.

Look, there isn't any software out there that can actually pull off what you're looking for, and honestly? I don't think one ever will. It’s just not happening. I mean, unless we're talking about some high-tech Hollywood magic in shows like CSI or whatever...

One way you could tackle this is through super-resolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution

The easiest route is probably just using some specialized diffusion or maybe even something like a selective Gaussian blur in Photoshop to respect those edges, and while you won't magically conjure up details that weren't there to begin with, the overall image will definitely look a lot better.

Look, you can't just conjure up pixels out of thin air. That’s what digital zoom is—it's just stretching the image, which makes everything look blurry as hell the more you blow it up. It's basic physics.

On the other hand, you've got optical zoom. That actually works with real, physical pixels that are already there. So, stop obsessing over digital zoom settings on your phone or whatever software you're using; it’s a dead end.

You simply cannot manufacture data that isn't there. You aren't going to take some tiny, low-res thumbnail and somehow extract meaningful, concrete details from it. It doesn't work like that. 👍

Thanks for the response.