RAW file enhance function in Camera Raw (Part one)

One of the features tucked away within Adobe’s Camera Raw 13.2 is an Enhance feature

It claims the ability to double your resolution, but does it work?

Lets take a quick look

How does it work?

Once you have imported your raw file into Camera Raw, right click on your image

I would suggest working with one file at a time, as is seems to be memory hungry

Click on the Enhance option
Tick “Super Resolution” and then enhance, you with see a dialog in the bottom left telling you the status, not very intuitive, and be patient, it does take a while

Your new file will be saved as a .dng file, with the original name with -Enhanced added

Open the .dng version of you file, and you will have your new Super Enhanced version

What does it do?

At a glance, it does indeed double your resolution

So on my 5Ds a full sized processed file at 8bit would be 144mg at 8688 x 5792 pixels

Using the enhance feature the file at 8 bit is 575mg at 17376 x 11584 pixels

Twice the height and width, and four times the area

But does it work, well sort of

Its seems to deal well with most things, but struggles with some textures as we will see

The Results

The full image, shot at 1/100th f5.0 iso100
Note the textures
Have a look at the detail around the hex bolt

All in all, not to bad really, but lets look at this next image

Shot at 1/125th f11 iso100

So lets have a closer look

Well there is certainly an improvement
The roof here picked up some distortion, but strangely, no other roof in the image was affected in the same way
This is resized in Photoshop, just using the default settings

It is a little hard to pick up on the differences online, everything is JPGed, where as the originals are all full sized .PSDs
But i assure you, there is a big and noticeable difference

Perhaps the biggest test will be an actual output, a full sized C-Type or Bromide print

With that in mind, we will look at some real world results in part two of this blog in a week or so

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