Adobe has just released its latest software software updates through Creative Cloud and those updates include a new feature in Adobe Camera Row (ACR) called “Super Resolution”. You can mark this day as a major shift in the photo industry.
I’ve seen a little report from the selection there on this issue Sub pixel And Fstoppers, But the specifics of this new feature in ACC are not widely promoted by what I can see. The new super resolution feature in the ACR, using machine learning, i.e. Artificial Intelligence (AI), essentially increases the size of the image by a factor of four.
This Sub pixel An article on this new feature quoted Adobe’s Eric Chen as saying:
Super Resolution builds on a technology Adobe introduced two years ago called Ambones Details, which uses machine learning to interpolate RAW files with the highest degree, resulting in crisp details and low-art images. The term ‘super resolution’ refers to the process of improving the quality of a photo by increasing its apparent resolution. “Giving a photo length often produces vague details, but Super Resolution has an ace in its sleeve: a state-of-the-art machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this huge training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos, maintaining clean edges and protecting important details.
What does this mean in practice? Well, I immediately investigated this and was very shocked by the results. Although it can be difficult to make it in the screenshot shot below, I took the surfing image shown below, which was captured a decade ago with a Nikon D700 – 12MP camera – and ran a super resolution tool on it and the final result.248. ૨ M.P. An image that looks as sharp (if not sharp) as each one than the original image file. This means that I now print that old 12MP image in a larger size than before.
This also means that anyone with a low resolution camera marrow, i.e. a crop of the current 24MP camera, can now output large image files for prints or any other use that requires a high resolution image file. I have found surprisingly good results in the three or four images I have run through this new feature in Photoshop.
Let’s see how this works. First, it works with any image file, whether it’s a raw images file, TIFF, or JPEG. You need to open the image file in Adobe Camera ROM via Photoshop or Adobe Bridge as shown below. To access the Super Resolution feature, right-click on the image and select “Expand” as shown below.
A dialog window will pop up so you can see what the image looks like and you can even tug back and forth between the original image and the new enhanced version. The dialog will give you an estimate of how long it will take to create a new enhanced image, which will appear as a separate image file. Once you’re ready, click the Enhance button in the bottom right-hand corner. The ACR immediately starts working in the background to create a new image file and it eventually appears next to the original file you selected where it is stored.
In my test, as shown below, it moved this old 12MP image from 4256 × 2832 pixels to 8512 × 5664 pixels. The following screenshot shows this growth. The top image is the lower resolution (original) version and the bottom image is the one that has gone through the super resolution process. The high-resistance image looks absolutely stunning. And at 48MP I can easily blow this up to a 40 inch 60 inch impression just like any image I captured using my 45 MP Nikon D850.
Once I upped the image using the super resolution feature, I zoomed into the resulting image and was very impressed. The image looked just as sharp (if not a bit sharp) as the original image file, but of course it’s much larger (in terms of resolution and file size) to really add a revolutionary addition to Photoshop. I have tried some Topaz AI software software options like Topaz Gigapixel AI, but I have not seen it run this way.
So what does this mean? For starters, that means A.I. Technology will have a huge impact on photography. Going forward, the software software we use to work with our images (and improve them) can, in some cases, have a greater impact on the final images than the camera used to capture the image.
To a certain degree, this new tool from Photoshop makes the playing field significantly better no matter which camera you are working with. Suddenly my Nikon Z6 and Fujifilm X-Pro 3 (24MP and 26MP cameras respectively) are able to produce stunningly large prints in a way that was simply not possible before.
What about the high-resolution cameras you might ask? Where do they end up with all this? The new Super Resolution tool will allow you to compress any image as long as the resulting “expanded” image file is less than 65,000 pixels on the long side and less than 500 MP in total. That means I can enhance 102MP images from my Fujifilm GFX100 and GFX100S cameras and generate insane 400MP image files from a single image. It’s becoming absurd, but it also opens up some doors for crazy wide prints.
The reality is that this feature is a huge boon for owners of low resolution (12MP to 16MP) and medium resolution (24MP) cameras. High resolution cameras will still achieve good image quality, but we now have the option to create larger prints from relatively low resolution image files.
Enlarging the photo to 6 376 megapixels
After talking to some photographer friends about this new feature, I played around with images from different cameras to see how it changes. I played some images from my Nikon Z6 and also from my Fujifilm GFX100. With the GFX100 image, the Super Resolution feature pulled out a 376MP image file, which was created just like the original image file, only four times larger. I felt the floor in my jaw when I zoomed in 100% and compared it to the original! You can see both original and enhanced images below. There’s really no way to give 100% image size because I have no control over the screen resolution of the viewer but regardless, they both look evil sharp.
From what I can tell, the Super Resolution tool works better than high resolution cameras and especially with cameras that do not have anti-aliasing filters in front of the sensor. My Nikon Z6 images look impressive when enhanced with this tool but don’t leave a jaw like the example above. The Z6 has a very strong anti-aliasing filter, basically a filter that slightly blurs the image to minimize digital artwork. In addition, it seems that the amount of sharpening or noise reduction applied to the image has also increased, so playing with how the image works can have a significant impact on the quality of the final image. I’ll have to do a few more tests.
If you’ve got this yet, and are still reading this complete pixel-peeping madness, you’ve probably realized that this could be the best upgrade to any and every camera. Adobe is one of the most incredible features ever published in Photoshop.
This is just the beginning of the AI revolution. It shows quite clearly that many advances in image quality are coming from the software side of the equation as we begin to see cameras with incredible specs that may be difficult to improve dramatically in the years to come. I’m so excited about this new option in Photoshop because it will offer me bigger prints than I was able to create before – and they will look stunning.
About the author: Michael Clarke is an internationally published outdoor photographer specializing in adventure sports, travel and landscape photography. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author only. Clark offers for National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, Sports Illustrated, Outside, Men’s Journal, Backpacker, Outdoor Photographer, Digital Photo Pro, Climbing, Alpinist, Rock and Ice, Bike Magazine and many others in The New York Times. You can find more of Clark’s work on his website, Facebook, Twitter, And Instagram. This article was also published here.
