Adobe’s ‘Enhanced Resolution’ looks great for Q2 crops

[Peter Gallagher]

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In my first tests, the new Adobe ‘enhance’ method in ACR/Photoshop seems to work very well to up-scale (i.e. interpolate) my cropped Q2 images. It makes my choice of the Q2 as my only camera still more reasonable.

I never shoot with the built-in ‘crop mode’ on the Q2. Instead, I shoot full-frame and crop in post as necessary. When images are properly exposed, the quality of e.g. a “70mm-equivalent” crop from the Q2 RAW is pretty good, especially near the center of the frame where the software ‘corrections’ of the Summilux lens’ distortions seem to have no impact.

Still, cropping inevitably dumps a lot of data out of the image (albeit no data is ever, really, ‘lost’ in LR). There’s no way to avoid some effect of this on the appearance of the image when it is presented at a larger size. Even when it prints nicely, there’s an unavoidable loss of micro contrast. In some images it doesn’t matter much (e.g. for large undifferentiated areas). But, say, detailed landscapes, cityscapes, close portraits... they don’t seem to me to be as convincing when they are a 30% crop from a larger image.

Of course, the Adobe procedure can’t quite fix this since the interpolated data is merely ‘gloop’ at very fine levels of detail. But, to me, the result looks much better than no interpolation and than other standard interpolation methods (e.g. Photoshops’ bicubic default), even when pixel-peeking on a high-resolution screen.

I don’t own the Topaz Gigapixel software, so I can’t compare it. I do own the Mac-only ‘Pixelmator Pro’ that offers a form of interpolation also based on ‘machine learning’. But Adobe’s effort looks a better than that.