WWDC24 Wallpaper
Don your dub-dub desktop decor.
Apple's annual developers conference, WWDC, is right around the corner! And to help dress up your desktop with some dub-dub decor, enjoy this wallpaper I rejigged from an Apple TikTok ad (TikTok | YouTube) promoting the event.
Process
For the past few days, Apple has been circulating a 10-second ad across social media promoting June 10 and the start of WWDC. The ad features a glowing Apple logo, then fancy transitions to text saying June 10 (aka, the beginning of the dub dub), flies through a few purple, orange, and yellow neon arches, and ends with text reading WWDC. In the time it took you to read that, you could have just watched it.
Anyway, I loved the look of that archway, and I thought it would make a gorgeous wallpaper to get us into the spirit of WWDC. Two problems: I needed more time to make the wallpaper from scratch than I had and wasn't confident I could mimic the look of the wallpaper well enough for Monday.
So, I took the video, found a frame I liked, and began upscaling it to a respectable wallpaper size. The image below shows the starting point: a dull, pixellated, and full-of-artifacts 480p video still. I tried resizing it to a 6K, but that exaggerated a bunch of the artifacts from the original image, making it look dreadful at a higher resolution. That strategy wasn't going to work.
From the start still frame, you can see how the curves have a jagged quality along with a ton of artifacting and pixellation.
So I started by cleaning up as much of the 480p image as possible, smoothing out items, fixing areas, and debanding the image before upscaling. That produced a better result, so I pursued it.
The technique I used in the end I'll dub Yo-Yo Upscaling™. I would take a small image, polish it, upscale it to a larger resolution, fix any issues, downscale it again, smooth out new issues, and upscale it again. It sounds like madness (and probably is), but this technique helped expose and refine away problems nicely. I did a few passes of that, upped the saturation, did some smoothing, added a little blue vignette, a bit of bloom, and voila!
Left: The starting 480p still image. Right: The upscaled 6K version used in the wallpaper.
If I had recreated it from scratch, the product could have been much more polished, but given that I started from a 480p TikTok ad, the finished product is impressive nonetheless. Enjoy.
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