Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Super Resolution: how to quadruple the size of the photo

Their super Adobe resolution feature in Lightroom and Photoshop is a remarkable technology that uses artificial intelligence to quadruple the size of your photos. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great way to breathe new life in older shots and to be printed photos larger with twice the number of pixels in be in width than in height. Here’s what it’s all about and how to use it.

To build the Super Resolution feature, Adobe has trained its Sensei AI technology on millions of real photos. He compared the originals with quarter–Size versions so the system could learn the best way to make them explode back up again. It applies that behavior by yourself photos, making very well informed assumptions about how to increase their resolution.

Yes, Photoshop is manufacturing pixels that weren’t there in the first place, and no, it won’t happen magically add detail the way Rick Deckard does it with “boost” commands in the science fiction movie Blade Runner. Aside from these caveats, I find it works well on many images, in particular when expanding edges, where it often does so without adding artifacts like soggy or jagged pixelization. Even the faces – the parts of images that we are often more concerned about – come out well.

Super Resolution works through the Adobe Camera Raw tool in Photoshop. Adobe has trained the feature for work on raw photos, the preferred format for photography enthusiasts and professionals for editing flexibility and image quality. But Super Resolution can work on conventional images, like the JPEGs and HEICs probably acquired by the phone.

That said, let’s go jump in. I will explain first how to use Super resolution on the right then how to apply it to JPEGs and finally how to use it in Adobe Lightroom software for editing and cataloging photos.

How to use Super resolution in Adobe Camera Raw from Photoshop

Begin the Super Resolution process by opening a raw file. Photoshop will open the raw files in the Adobe Camera Raw tool directly.

Next, right-click on the photo and select Enhance option. you can also use the Command-Shift-D keyboard shortcut on macOS and Control-Shift-D on Windows.

You will see an Advanced Preview dialog box with a couple of options to control the process. Before the Raw details option, Adobe added in 2019 gets better how raw files are displayed. Below that, do sure you have selected the Super Resolution checkbox. To see the expected results, click and drag to pan the preview image or click on the magnifying glass icon to zoom out and then click again on the patch you want to scrutinize.

Then, click the Enhance button and wait. Photoshop shows his esteem for how long the process will take – several minutes in some cases, but it is often done faster in my test, sometimes just a few seconds to transform 12 megapixels photos into 48 megapixels.

If you want to ignore the Advanced Preview dialog box, hold down down Option on MacOS or Alt on Windows while clicking Enhance option.

After that comes the tuning. I recommend zooming in carefully to edit the details like sharpness, texture, and noise reduction using the cursors on the right edge of the instrument.

Finally, click the Finish button, which will save the new version next to the original with “-Improved” added to its file name, or Open, which opens the image in Photoshop.

How to use Super resolution on a JPEG

To apply Super Resolution to JPEG, HEIC, or TIFF, you will need first you have to change Photoshop preferences to open those file formats in Adobe Camera Raw by default. Unfortunately, you can’t just use the Camera Raw Filter menu command of the Filter menu.

First, open Photoshop preferences, go to the File Handling section, then click Camera Raw Preferences. In the next dialogue box that appears, click on the File Management section. Change the JPEG / HEIC drop-down menu in “Automatically open all supported images” and do the same with TIFF images if you want even that.

Note that this will mean these images will open in Adobe Camera Raw even if you don’t want to use Super Resolution and the rest of Adobe Camera Raw editing options. Personally, I like them, since I do more of my photo editing in Lightroom: A close relative of Adobe Camera Raw. But if you want Photoshop regular behavior, you will have to switch it off in Photoshop preferences again.

DSLRs and mirrorless cameras from Sony, Nikon, Canon, and other cameras all creators have the option to shoot in raw mode, but smartphones are also improving, with Apple’s ProRaw and Google’s computational raw technology.

How to use Super resolution from Adobe Lightroom

For a few months there, it was tough to use Super Resolution if you use lightroom filters for cataloging and modifying your photos. happily, with the June 2021 release of Lightroom, the feature is built-in.

Using it is simple, but it is a step off the tracks beaten by your usual editing and cataloging operations. Select the photo in Lightroom Library Mode, then choose “Enhance” from the Photo menu. you can also right the mouse button on the image to get the option in a pop-up menu.

After a moment to generate a preview, you will see a dialog box that allows you to pan preview, zoom and out, click to compare before and after previews and check Lightroom estimate for how to time it will take work. Click “Enhance” when ready.

How with Photoshop, it is best to a pixel peep to check your detailed zoomed edits in. You could want to turn down sharpness, in particular in the areas like hair, where Super Resolution can make mistakes or upset up noise reduction. I have also found that manually adjusting the purple and green fringes problems in the lens corrections panels can be useful for reducing color artifacts.

Note that the keyboard shortcut for Improving is different for Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, the two very different versions of Adobe of Lightroom. Lightroom Classic (which stores photos on your computer storage system) is Ctrl-Alt-I on Windows and Ctrl-Opt-I on Mac OS. For Lightroom (which stores photos in the cloud and syncs them through your computer, phone, and other devices) the shortcut is Ctrl-Alt-E on Windows Cmd-Opt-E on Mac OS.

Also, in Lightroom Classic, you can skip the Enhance dialog box is just football off a Super Resolution expansion with Shift-Control-Alt-I on Windows and Shift-Control-Option-I on Mac OS. They’ll apply the previous Enhance settings, so if you’ve unchecked Super Resolution previously, you will need to reselect it via the dialog box first.

Super resolution in Lightroom is in can handle JPEG and raw images, although it will transform JPEG into a DNG file. How with all DNG files, you will need to export a JPEG for easy sharing.