Adobe recently released a new feature that expands on the existing “enhance details.” Super Resolution uses artificial intelligence to increase the resolution of camera raw images. It does this astonishingly well.
For now, the easiest way I have found to access the feature is to open an image in Adobe Bridge. Then a right click will bring up the enhance feature. I have read that the same workflow is available in Photoshop, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me. This will no doubt be coming to both Photoshop and Lightroom soon.
I started with this image of Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The image was taken April 17, 2015. The original image is 4032 x 3024 pixels, 69.8 MB (reduced in size here). That’s plenty big enough for on-line work (too big to even upload via WordPress), but I applied the Super Resolution enhancement, and I ended up with an image that is 8064 x 6048 pixels, 139.5 MB.
It’s easiest to see the result in the following detail comparison. For the purposes of the web, even this detail comparison is reduced in size from the original enhanced image. I simply scaled up the original image, on the left, in Photoshop to match the size of the enhanced image.
The enhancement looks very natural and completely unforced, free of artifacts. This is an astonishingly effective new feature from Adobe. Is it needed for all of your images? Certainly not. But if you want to crop to a small portion of an image, or if you want to make a very large print, this is a great tool to have. I’m blown away by what Adobe has been doing with AI recently, and this may be their best work yet.