Four Portugese girls sharing a coat

 Adobe have just announced a new Photoshop Lightroom feature, Super Resolution, which they describe as" the process of improving the quality of a photo by boosting its apparent resolution. Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution is an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this vast training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details".

As I am now using a 42mp Leica Q2 I won't often have the need to boost the resolution but after reading the Adobe description of the new feature I tried it out on a photo taken with the Leica Q which "only" has 24mp.

 I gave a real world test by making big crops of a photo I took on a cool morning in Lisbon, Portugal, back in 2019 in the glorious time when we could all travel.

The top two photos below are the finished result. The middle photo of the trio is an extreme crop and the resolution is really holding up. Who needs a longer lens? And bear in mind that the photos have lost resolution when uploaded to the blog. The originals are better.

As well as the Super Resolution tool I have worked on it in Lightroom Classic. The original uncropped unprocessed photo is at the bottom. It is a DNG (RAW) file and was taken at 1/125th sec at f/1.7 at ISO 250. 

In my book this is a useful piece of software. It would be interesting to see how it performs on a photo taken with a less well specified camera. That's a test for another day.

I have recently been amazed at the quality of the photos from my iPhone SE Mk2 and the photos from the iPhone 12 are even better still. The phones use computational photography see- Computational Photography-to produce high quality images using very small sensors and tiny moulded lenses. Adobe's Super Resolution tool allows large enlargements/big crops from existing digital files so there are similarities in the results and probably the process.