At Home with Tech

If you’ve got an old digital photo that looks grainy when you crop in, it’s time to add in more pixels with a little AI assistance. This cropped photo of our cat from 2008 benefits from 4x more pixels on the left generated by Adobe Lightroom.

We all know the famous scene in the 1982 sci-fi movie “Blade Runner” where Harrison Ford’s futuristic detective inserts a photo into a computer and tells it to zoom in and enhance the clarity of the background until he finds a person hidden in a reflection from a tiny mirror.

No, we can’t tell today’s computers to scan a photo, “track 45 left” and then “enhance 15 to 23” to find what’s there. But we’re getting closer.

That’s thanks to today’s software that can increase resolution in lower-res photos while maintaining the quality (and without adding digital artifacts). This trick can also clean up jaggy edges that become more apparent when you zoom into a low-res pic.

Often, when you crop in too tight on a photo, grainy problems show up, because you’ve deleted too many of the pixels. You’ve suddenly created a low-res photo that clearly needs pixel infusion.

Enhance Tool is Not Science Fiction
Adobe Lightroom can help. It has an AI-powered upsampling ‘Enhance’ feature called ‘Super Resolution.’ This nifty tool creates a duplicate photo with four times the pixels. And that can make a significant difference.

Here’s how to ‘enhance’ a digital photo in Lightroom:

• Click on the Photo dropdown on the top menu
• Click on Enhance
• Click on Super Resolution
• Then click Enhance
  (You can preview the effect before you proceed.)
• Voilà! An ‘enhanced’ file is generated in a DNG format.

There are other companies that offer similar solutions, but as Adobe Lightroom Classic is my main photo-editing and organization tool, I’m very happy to keep my workflow in one place.

A Useful Tool for the Right Circumstances
I’ve used this enhance trick mostly when I work with digital photos that I took twenty years ago. That’s, of course, during the early age of digital photography when original file sizes were relatively tiny.

It’s a helpful solution, but this tool is not magic. It can’t create what’s not there or fix a blurry photo. But it does add in a bit more visual crispness, even if you’re not having a pixelization problem.

It’s also quite helpful if you want to print out the photo. A physical print is usually more unforgiving than a computer screen.

Adding Pixels into My Old Photos
Here’s a photo I took of an actor playing a Klingon at the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas back in 2001.
The original photo file was only 1024 x 768 pixels. I’ve cropped it in tight to just 198 x 264 pixels. The enhanced version on the left gets our friendly Klingon up to 396 x 598, which does make a difference.

Here’s a street shot I took in Hong Kong in 2005.
The enhanced shot on the left helps to bring out the background. You can also make out some of the car’s license plate letters.

Smile for AI
If you’ve found yourself having to squint to pick out the above differences, that’s okay. They’re minor, but they’re there. I think it’s fair to say that Adobe Lightroom’s “Super Resolution” mostly gives you minor sharpening.

It’s not a magic wand, but it does give you 4x more pixels to work with out of thin air.

With AI’s text-to-image capabilities already in common use today, I’m sure this is not the last time we’ll be discussing how AI can rebuild old photos in just a few clicks.