This is a follow up to part one after I have had a good chance to look at the new Enhance Function in Adobe’s Camera Raw 13.2

The above image was taken more than 8 years ago with a Canon EOS-1Ds MkII

Its a full frame 16 megapixel sensor paired with a 50 f1.8 standard lens, perhaps a better camera to show how the Enhance Function can work well

The original file would be just under 50mg at 8 bit, using the enhance brings it up to 182mg at 8 bit

The Enhance really does decent job too, just the sort of thing its suited for, its kept a lot of the fine details

The strips above are the image from part one, and have been worked up to be C-Type at 6×4 feet (122x182cm), not an uncommon size we are asked to produce at work, and although hard to see in the camera phone pics, it really is woth going that extra mile to get the better image quality

So overall, while it might seem extreme to some, this function is a very useful and welcome feature, and hopefully in time, will be better intergrated into Camera Raw and Photoshop

S

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

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

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

So lets have a closer look

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