Photoshop Super Resolution is new to the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Right now it’s available in Camera RAW, Photoshop, and Bridge. But Adobe’s plan is to bring it to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic eventually. My hope is that they improve on it, and expand on it, before doing so. You see, Photoshop Super Resolution is limited to 2X the size of the original, and also contains artifacts from the enlargements. In this video, I will compare the Photoshop Super Resolution file to Topaz Gigapixel Ai’s results.
Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar
Today. I want to talk about a new feature called super resize inside of Photoshop. And this is an AI based in a large mint feature that can turn a small JPEG, like the one you see right here into a raw file in an Adobe DNG format. In the past, I’ve made a video on Topaz gigapixel AI, and it is a pretty cool tool, but it’s another piece of software that has to be installed in your machine. And if you already are Photoshop user, you know, have access to super resize. And today I want to show you how to do super resize. Adobe did not make it very straightforward in order to access this like they should have, but I’m going to show you how to do it anyway. Hey, this is Scott one. Kivowitz a storyteller with a camera talking about all the things photographers like you and I are thinking about.
And in this video, I want to talk about enlarging older, small photos, and I’m going to use an example of chosen Miyagi. Joe, Jim Yagi is the, the grandfather of Goju Ru this is the grandfather of, of the karate that I study personally. And if you ever seen the karate kid, which you probably have, then you would recognize go Jeru karate in that movie. And yes, Mr. Miyagi was named after chosen Miyaki. So the photo you see right here is chosen Miyagi, and this is an very, very old photo, as you can tell. And what I want to show you is if you look over here, you’ll see that we’ve got the original, which is 433 kilobytes. This is a very small image. It is extremely small. It is 847 pixels by 10 88, but I ran into gigapixel and I enlarged it to a 27 95 as the widest length.
And you can see that, uh, it actually increased it to 6.9 megabytes. And when you, when we look at these images side by side, you’ll see that there is some improvement. Uh, there’s no real loss in quality in the enlargement. Gigapixel does a pretty decent job. Now, of course, this is not the cleanest photo to begin with, but that’s okay. I wanted to show that an old photo won’t gain more artifacts by enlarging. Then what you got here is another one that is 24.4 megabytes. And this is actually a DNG file that Photoshop has made for me using the new super resize feature. So let’s dig into this so you can see the differences of how this works. So here we are inside of gigapixel, you can see it’s actually rendering the preview. And the max height is set to 27 95 right here, and you can see the side-by-side that it actually did get a little bit sharpened, which is kind of nice.
I had this all set to order right now, and you can see that it’s an improvement. I have face refinement off because it’s not going to do any good for a photo like this. And then all you have to do is hit save. And it’s going to save that image just as you see it, this beautiful enlarged image that isn’t any less quality even while expanded using gigapixel, but Topaz made it very simple. You just open the image and you hit save, and it’s basically done for you. So let’s hit into Photoshop so you can see what Photoshops method of doing this. If your photo is not a raw file to begin with, you should actually start inside of Adobe bridge. You go find that photo, right, click on the thumbnail for that photo, and then you’re gonna choose open in camera raw. Now, once camera is open, all you have to do is right click again.
Now on that photo and hit enhance, you are now presented with this new dialog box and in it is a super resolution checkbox. Make sure that it’s checked. It will be checked by default and then hit enhance. As you will see, there is now a new thumbnail on the bottom. That is a new roll file that was created inside of Adobe camera raw, which now can be opened inside of Photoshop. Now, the differences between using Topaz gigapixel AI and using Photoshops method is with Photoshops method. You get that raw file. So if you, if this was not a super old photo like this, and it was a little bit more modern, then there’s more that you’ll be able to do with that photo, of course. But my goal here is to show you the side-by-side of these two photographs. So you can see the difference between what gigapixel did and what Photoshop did with super resize.
So on the right side, we have gigapixels version and you can see right now it is at 93.8% of the sort of zoom level. And if we just go in and we go into 300% and we go right to the eyes, I’m going to try to match these up on both sides. And then on the Photoshop side, we are at 120 already zoomed in, and if we go to 300% and we go down again, you’ll see, there’s a difference because we can still have been more on the Photoshop side. Now, if we do the side-by-side comparison, you’ll see that right away. Uh, we’ve got more texture here and we have more digital artifacts on the Photoshop side. And if we zoom out a little bit more to try to match this even better, that’s a little bit closer. You’ll see that it’s still, you’re getting these artifacts over here at 400% versus 300% on the Topaz side.
So Topaz did a better job at actually, uh, sort of keeping the artifacts out of the photo by recreating those pixels as texture, whereas Photoshop sorta just expanded it and added in the artifacts. Now, again, this would be better with a more modern photo. So we’re going to go ahead and just quickly switch over to a more modern photo. I’m going to stay with the karate sort of feel to it and let’s see how it does. This is an old, this is a photo of my father-in-law and obviously he’s not really hurting this young student. Uh, this is many years ago. He was actually posing, trying to do an example, whatever, for some sort of training thing that was going on. Um, and, uh, yeah, so I’m going to right click and I’m going to, uh, do opening camera raw. As you can see this as a very small photo to begin with, and then I’m going to right click and I’m going to do enhance and just let it, And then To go over to that raw file and hit open. Now it’s going to open this in Photoshop and I’m going to do the same thing and gigapixel, and again, we’ll compare a more modern photo. It’s again, old scan, but we will compare these two right away inside of gigapixel. You can see it’s not doing too much to clean things up, but I’m going to hit save image. And we’re going to save these anyway. And I’m doing this at 4% because I feel like if we go any further, it’s not going to be very beneficial. Okay. So again, we have gigapixel on the right end Photoshops on the left. First thing I noticed is that the gigapixel one is larger and isn’t really much clearer than the Photoshop one. That’s got a little bit more sharpness going on on the right side. The Photoshop one is actually quite small. If you look at it at 100% versus a hundred percent, you’ll see that gigapixel made it larger out of the gate at a four X enlargement where Photoshop made it maybe a one or a two X enlargement. It’s not much bigger Original.
But you can see that a hundred percent. This one still looks clear. Whereas the Photoshop one, if I make it the same size, it starts to lose the, uh, the detail. And you start to see more artifacts. Let’s do one more photo, a more modern photo. Again, I’ll stick with the karate theme. So this photo originally was quite large, but I’ve actually shrunk it down to 800 and I’m going to right click opening camera. And then as you can see, we’re starting to get some artifacts I’m going to right. Click and hit enhance, and we’re going to make a super resolution and we’re going to open it up in Photoshop. And now I’m gonna head over to gigapixel. I’m probably gonna stick to Forex just for this example. And we’re just gonna hit save image. I’m not gonna do any other refinements and I’m gonna open it up inside of Photoshop.
First thing we’ll notice is the gigapixel. One is sharp. Look how crisp that is even along between the background and the, and the people there are. And this is my karate instructor, by the way, um, you can see that there is no artifacts along the edges. It looks super crisp. Whereas the Photoshop version, there’s still some major artifacts and it’s smaller by default. It is smaller. Uh, this is 165% to fill this, fill this frame. This is 82.5%. It’s not even full size. This is full size. And then if I go back, this is full size for that. So you can see there’s a big difference in what Photoshop is doing. Natively was super resize versus what a gigapixel is capable of doing. Now. I’m seeing a lot of people on YouTube and in blogs saying that super resolution is knocking gigapixel out of the park.
I, I can’t confirm that. Um, I, I, I’m not seeing the same thing I’m seeing, uh, gigapixel really do better than what Photoshop is currently doing. Of course, this is still brand new to Photoshop. So, you know, time will tell what will happen. And of course, Photoshop has the power of Adobe sensei. So it’s got some of the best AI in the world for photographs. So it’s going to get better for sure. Hopefully they refine and improve it before they throw it into Lightroom as well, because a Lightroom doesn’t need more features right now. Lighter needs more speed. So if they’re gonna throw it in, they better make sure it’s darn good. And not just what we’re seeing right here. There you go. Three different examples, a super old photo from the, maybe the 18 hundreds, 17 hundreds. I don’t even know a very old photo from probably the eighties. And then, uh, we’ve got a photo from bout 2018, 2016, something like that. I’d have to go back into marcomms. It couldn’t be could even be 2012 for all. I know. I’d have to figure it out, but anyway, they didn’t go. That is gigapixel AI versus Photoshops new super resolution feature. You’d be the judge. If you liked this video, click that subscribe button below right now, I publish new videos every Monday and Thursday, whenever possible. You don’t want to miss it.
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