Lightroom Classic
Keeping up with the Jones'; A dive into the new A.I. enhance features.
Or maybe just keeping up? Many times I’ve discussed untimely auto-updates of Adobe Creative Cloud, and specifically Lightroom Classic. For personal work I would probably be agnostic about new features as I am about most camera upgrades. For the most part I was happy with film in various formats. I have been mostly happy with very few complaints since about 2015 or so. Sure, we all have niggles and personal pet peeves but I’ve been happy with my cameras and my workflow for quite a while.
As someone that hosts workshops for a large variety of photographers I have a duty to be aware of and reasonably competent in the latest versions of software that is in common use (Read Adobe) for the vast majority of attendees. Reasonably competent means I can answer questions about features and am at least familiar with their use, hopefully being able to advise people on when it can be of help, better ways to use features, when a feature has caveats, or may be problematic. In a nutshell, what makes the most sense in getting from point A to point B. Case in point; The new (relatively) Enhance… features in Lightroom Classic. There are three of them, Denoise, Raw Details, and of course, Super Resolution. For those of you that may have skipped through the “what’s new” stuff over the last few updates these are accessed via right click - Enhance or via the Photo menu.
All of these are not presented within panes in the develop module so they are easy to miss if you just want to go about your day. All of them are “A.I.” based without much detail as to how exactly they are “A. I.” but everything new has to be “A.I.” as that’s now reached a common meaning of “better”. It also seems to be an indicator of slow compared to other things in the develop module. To be fair, they aren’t that slow but certainly slow compared to the virtual real-time response of most photographic operations on modern hardware like my Mac Studio. Maybe that’s why they aren’t in the Develop module”, then again the “Content Aware” healing is… who knows. Same reason why the crop short key is R.
I am still gaining experience with lots of different scenes, genres, RAW files, and image print sizes. In a nutshell none of these enhance features is what I expected. In a way that’s a good thing, maybe? They are certainly NOT over-the-top effects. On the contrary they are so subtle the effect is hard to see at first, second, and third glance. This is the case for most decent images. I am glad they’re not grossly artificial looking “enhancements”. Let’s do a quick walk-thru of each.
RAW Details
Ooooooo, everyone needs RAW details. Who wouldn’t want that? This is interestingly misnamed, it should maybe be something more akin to ultra subtle try this instead of a tiny hair of clarity especially for recovering addicts of cranking that slider way to high — for short that would be USTT IOATH OCE FRAOCTS as multi-acronym (never heard of that did you?) how’s that pronounced. Maybe Adobe’s name is better. In a word, subtle, very subtle. If the 100% comparison at the top of a 50mpx image here’s the 300% view.
I’ve tried this on many different mixes of super sharp, not so sharp, high DOF, and low DOF images and it never seems to produce any night/day effects. I’d love to hear from any experts on RAW Details and when it provides clearly visible results in typical viewing circumstances. My take for now is go ahead use it if you want, it might make for the finishing touch when printing at high magnification/large sizes. There is one exception though… I would definitely stay away from this if your image has noise, there’s a potential it will make that noise “more detailed” which I do not find pleasant. Maybe why that’s why you are forced to run Denoise and RAW Details together? The real question is it a must-have as a stand alone? Moving on to Denoise.
Denoise
Here’s an a-ha moment, there’s a specific reason Suuuuper Resolution is coupled with the new Denoise. What I said above hold’s true in that the effect is so subtle I’d not recommend one waste the time to use it as a matter of course. The entire Suuuuper Resolution feature seems purpose built to support Denoise. You cannot run Denoise without running Super Resolution. From my evaluation on a number of cameras, resolutions, scenes, and degrees of noise, the new Enhance Denoise produces far better results than the traditional noise reduction amount and detail sliders in the develop module. There may be cases you may want to use the old-school develop module even most of the time but if you are making very large prints and they need a serious amount of noise reduction then the new Enhance Denoise is clearly superior. Realize, I am okay with noise as long as it looks remotely like film grain. I even add a bit of fake grain in many cases. When making super large prints or you have massive, clearly digital looking noise artifacts this new feature seems to be a winner.
Super Resolution
Soooooper Resolution, maybe a bit of hyperbole? Maybe not. This is a crazy great tool now built in to the ubiquitous Lightroom Classic. Most readers know my take on generic up-resing of images, 300 DPI or any arbitrary number is highly conditional and we do not do it as a matter of course for very large prints. I did put the caveat in there, we do up-res files when there is a clear need and benefit but it’s always a specialized operation, typically and absolutely not just using the Lightroom Print module. This up-size is fantastic on most images I’ve tried. It’s a fixed doubling of resolution, not doubling in terms of the number of pixels, rather it’s doubling the linear resolution — four times the number of pixels. Your 20mpix file is now 80mpix and for most images it’s hard to tell the difference (other factors like lenses and technique, and capture quality aside, I’ll show you some tests soon).
This is clearly very, very good. I’ve not yet done a direct comparison to the newest versions of software that specializes in up-sizing but from previous uses, this new standard feature of Lightroom seems to hold up very, very well. I am pleased and may just eliminate the need for a large portion of users maintaining specialized software for this need. For me, simple is better, fewer things to learn, maintain, and more importantly understand well are better than more.
I like small prints, I like reasonably big prints like 13x19 or 17x22 and the like. This is so good it may even reenforce the “sweet spot” of digital resolution for people that occasionally make giant prints viewed at reasonably close distances (the billboard thing is a myth, those are viewed from long distances).
Final Thoughts
Let’s call it two and a half great new Lightroom Classic features for anyone that makes large prints or depends on zero-noise images. RAW Details seems to be built to use with Denoise. I have far more testing and experience to gain to see if there is a case to be made for using RAW Details on its own. Suuuuper Resolution is a winner. The curious thing is that you cannot use Super Resolution directly on a DNG file produced by RAW Details or Denoise. Why not? Is it because RAW Details and Denoise are baked into Super Resolution. From cursory analysis the answer is it does not look like they are baked in, at least not completely but the noise does seem to be a lot less prominent in the Super Resolution DNG than the original RAW at 200% so maybe some form of those are applied? Of course you can work around that by exporting the Super Resolution DNG to a TIFF and then running Denoise on that.
If you have any insights on the new Lightroom Enhance features please share them. If I’ve left something out or don’t understand a few of my thoughts, feel free to ask.
Thanks for the guidance and doing the pioneering work.
I find Super Resolution useful because it does me to crop an image significantly and then up-res it back to something I can print. My favourite camera is my little RX100 so a heavy crop can significantly reduce the MPs down to something that's a little lacking even at 12x8.
The denoise tool is, as you say, much better than the traditional denoising tools in LR and for a small sensor camera the new denoise is, with no exaggeration, revolutionary. While I would previously have been reluctant to go above 800ISO on the RX100, I now let it float up to 3200 knowing I can still get a good printable image. That said, despite having this tool built into LR, which is very convenient, these days I use DXO's nose reduction software PureRAW. I think it does a slightly better job than the LR tool and also incorporates DXO's lens correction modules.
I hope in future updates Adobe will offer a greater level of control over how these tools are applied (something that DXO does), but, thinking back to earlier versions of LR (I started back with version 2) it's incredible how capable these programs have become.