Adobe has just released its latest software updates through Creative Cloud and among those updates is a new feature in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) called “Super Resolution”. You can mark this day as a major change in the photographic industry.
I saw a little report on this subject from people like PetaPixel and Fstoppers, but other than that, the ramifications of this new feature in ACR have not been widely publicized as far as I can see. The new Super Resolution feature in ACR essentially enhances the image by a factor of four using machine learning, that is, Artificial Intelligence (AI).
THE PetaPixel article on this new feature quoted Eric Chan from Adobe:
Super Resolution is based on a technology launched by Adobe two years ago called Enhance Details, which uses machine learning to interpolate RAW files with a high degree of fidelity, resulting in images with sharp details and less artifacts. The term ‘Super Resolution’ refers to the process of improving the quality of a photo by increasing its apparent resolution, ”explains Chan. “Magnifying a photo usually produces blurry details, but Super Resolution has an ace up its sleeve: an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Supported by this vast training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos, keeping edges clean and preserving important details.
What does this mean in practice? Well, I tested this right away and was very shocked by the results. Although it can be difficult to distinguish in the screenshot below, I took the surf image shown below, which was captured a decade ago with a Nikon D700 – a 12 MP camera – and ran the Super Resolution tool on it and the end result is a 48.2 MP image that appears to be as sharp (if not sharper) than the original image file. This means that I can now print that old 12 MP image in significantly larger sizes than before.
What this also means is that anyone with a lower resolution camera, that is, the current crop of 24 MP cameras, can now generate huge image files for prints or any other use that requires a resolution image file taller. In the three or four images that I examined this new feature in Photoshop, I found that the results are amazingly good.
Let’s see how it works. First, it works with any image file, be it a raw image file, a TIFF or JPEG. You will need to open the image file in Adobe Camera Raw via Photoshop or Adobe Bridge as shown below. To access the Super Resolution feature, right-click on the image and choose “Enhance” as shown below.
A dialog window will appear so that you can see what the image will look like and you can also switch between the original image and the new enhanced version. The dialog box will provide an estimate of how long it will take to create the new enhanced image, which will appear as a separate image file. When you’re ready, just click the Upgrade button in the bottom right corner. ACR starts working in the background immediately to build the new image file, and eventually it appears next to the original file you selected, wherever it is stored.
In my tests, as shown below, this old 12 MP image went from 4256 × 2832 pixels to 8512 × 5664 pixels. The images below show this magnification. The upper image is the lower resolution version (original) and the lower image is the one that has gone through the Super resolution process. The high resolution image looks absolutely incredible. And with 48 MP I could easily scale this up to a 40 × 60 inch print, just like any image captured using my 45 MP Nikon D850.
After upsizing the image using the super resolution feature, I enlarged the resulting image and was very impressed. The image looked as sharp (if not a little sharper) than the original image file, but of course it is much larger (in terms of resolution and file size). Congratulations to the folks at Adobe for creating a truly revolutionary addition to Photoshop. I tried some of the Topaz AI software options, like Topaz Gigapixel AI, but I didn’t see it working so well.
So what does that mean? To begin with, this means that AI technology will have a big impact on photography. In the future, the software we use to work with our images (and optimize them) may, in some cases, have a greater effect on the final images than the camera that was used to capture them.
To some extent, this new tool in Photoshop significantly equalizes the playing field, no matter which camera you’re working with. Suddenly, my Nikon Z6 and Fujifilm X-Pro3 (respectively 24 MP and 26 MP cameras) are capable of producing large, impressive prints in a way that was simply not possible before.
What about high-resolution cameras, you might ask? Where do they end all this? The new Super Resolution tool will allow any image to be updated, as long as the resulting “Enhanced” image file is less than 65,000 pixels on the long side and less than 500MP in total. What that means is that I can use the 102MP images from my Fujifilm GFX 100 and GFX 100S cameras and produce insane 400MP image files from a single image. This is getting absurd, but it also opens some doors for huge, crazy impressions.
The reality is that this feature is a great advantage for owners of cameras with lower resolution (12MP to 16MP) and even medium resolution (24MP). Higher resolution cameras will still produce better image quality, but we now have the option to make large copies of relatively low resolution image files.
Enhancing a photo to 376 megapixels
After talking to some photographer friends about this new feature, I played around with images from several different cameras to see how it varies. I ran some images of my Nikon Z6 and also some of my Fujifilm GFX 100. With the GFX 100 image, the Super Resolution feature appeared a 376 MP image file that was almost identical to the original image file, only four times larger. My jaw dropped to the floor when I zoomed in 100% and compared it to the original! You can see the original and enhanced images below. There is no way to convey the image size 100% here, as I have no control over the viewer’s screen resolution, but regardless, both look incredibly sharp.
As far as I can tell, the Super Resolution tool seems to do an even better job with higher resolution cameras and, in particular, with cameras that don’t have an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. My Nikon Z6 images when enhanced with this tool still look impressive, but not as impressive as in the example above. The Z6 has a very strong anti-aliasing filter, basically a filter that slightly blurs the image to reduce digital artifacts. In addition, it appears that the amount of sharpness or noise reduction applied to the image is also increased, so playing with the way the image is worked on can have a significant effect on the quality of the final image. I will have to do some more tests.
If you’ve made it this far and are still reading this complete pixel-viewing madness, then you must have realized that this could be the best update for any camera of all time. This is certainly one of the most amazing features that Adobe has ever launched in Photoshop.
This is just the beginning of the AI revolution. It also clearly shows that many of the advances in image quality will come from the software side of the equation, as we begin to see cameras with incredible specifications that can be difficult to improve dramatically in the years to come. I’m super excited about this new option in Photoshop, as it will allow me to offer much larger prints than I was able to create before – and they will look impressive.
About the author: Michael Clark is an internationally published outdoor photographer specializing in adventure sports, travel and landscape photography. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Clark contributes to 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 The New York Times among many others. You can find more of Clark’s work on his website, Facebook, Twitterand Instagram. This article was also published here.