Photoshop's hidden superpower for photographers: Enhance Detail
Sometime around late 2020 Adobe added a feature to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)—which is embedded in Photoshop—that allows you to quadruple the size of a picture while retaining much of the detail.
For example, you could create a 20MP picture from a 5MP picture and, dependent on a few considerations, end up with a picture that would exhibit minimal loss of detail.
Adobe tell us that this is possible due to some serious AI (artificial intelligence) that they have built into the Enhance Detail functionality provided in ACR. If you dig deep enough you will find information relating to Adobe building up this AI by scanning and enlarging over two million sample pictures.
In my example pictures below I have used a RAW image taken back in January 2003 with a Minolta DiMage 7i (remember those?) 5MP digital camera. The first picture shows the original 5MP shot as taken by the camera. Using ACR embedded in Photoshop I have then 'enhanced' this up to 20MP and the result is shown in the second picture.
Both pictures are 1024x768 crops.
Note that no post-processing has been done on this picture. This is the RAW straight from the camera.
Check out the hair detail on the spider’s right leg. How good is that?
For best results you need to start with a picture that has a lot of detail stored in the image file. ‘Old’ RAW files are perfect.
If you were to start with a JPG that has already been saved with 50 percent compression, or more, then the Enhanced Detail version created by ACR will not be as good. The reasons for this should be obvious to any serious photographers so I will not waste two or three paragraphs explaining why this is the case.
To show this super power again, the picture below is a RAW from a Minolta DiMage A1. The first version in a 1024x768 crop from the original. The second picture is the same size crop from the ACR Enhance Detail version.
The third picture shows the Enhance Detail crop with some basic post-processing such at setting the black and whites, and basic sharpening for screen viewing.
This is how you do it
You obviously need to have Adobe Photoshop. You also need a reasonable quality picture to enlarge; preferably a RAW picture … but it doesn't have to be.
What follows is my process, but there are other ways to do this.
Save the target picture in TIFF format. You can do this by opening it in Photoshop and then re-saving it as a TIFF. Save in IBM format with no compression.
Use ‘File > Open As’ in Photoshop and select the target TIFF file.
Open the file format options at the bottom right of the ‘Open As’ dialog and select the line starting with “Camera Raw”.
Open the file. If you have done things right then it will open into Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).
Right click on the picture and you should see something like this.
Select “Enhance” or use Ctrl+Shift+D. The following dialogue panel will then display.
Click on Enhance.
A progress bar will appear at the bottom left of the ACR window showing the progress of the enhancement. Large RAW files from modern DSLR camera can take a couple of minutes to Enhance.
Once the progress bar completes then the enhanced image will have been created and stored on your computer in the same location from which you opened the ‘Open As’ TIFF file. The enhanced file will be an Adobe DNG file with ‘Enhanced’ added to the file name.
The clip above shows the starting TIFF file (RedBackB4) and the Enhance Detail DNG file (RedBackEnhanced) for the picture of the red back spider.
You can now open the DNG version of the file and work on it in Photoshop as required.
And now you know how to use Photoshop’s ‘hidden’ super power of increasing the dimensions of a picture by a factor of four—double the width and double the height.
Why would you need to do this?
There are two possible reasons for using this super power of Photoshop/ACR:
You want to make a large print of a picture that you have where the resolution and/or the dimensions of the picture need to be increased.
You want to crop a picture down and then do a print of the crop, but when you do the crop the picture is not of sufficient resolution to make a good print. Then you can use the Enhance Detail super power to make the picture four times the size, then do the crop, then size-down the crop to make the improved print.
Pictures from smart phones (cell phones)
I have tried using this super power with pictures from my Samsung S20 however the results are not that impressive. This is likely due to the computational characteristics of pictures taken with modern smart phones plus the fact most smart phone picture are not that well focused when viewed larger.
For good result you do need to start with sharp focused pictures because the enhancement process will amplify the focus blur in even marginally unfocussed pictures.
EDIT: 11th Sept, 2021
I came across an article on the Photography Lift site by Spencer Cox that provides more information about this Photoshop tool.
Check this out if you want to see more about this tool.