DIGITAL IMAGERY

PIXEL PROPHET REVOLTION OF SUPER-RESOLUTION

With AI potential, Martin Christie uncovers the power of a super-resolution — upsampling images four times without losing quality.

The printed image’s power has long been a running theme in this column; thankfully, it remains a truth. When the onset of digital technology started, many predicted it would be the end of anything committed to ‘old fashioned’ paper. Of course, the electronic revolution has meant that pictures can be captured, transmitted and shared in previously unimaginable quantities. Still, the very volume and the instant ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of so many of them makes them as disposable as yesterday’s headlines.

Just how many of today’s top internet images will stand the test of time remains to be judged by future generations, but fortunately, the previous technology of photography has left us some priceless insights into not so distant history. Helped by modern techniques of enhancing colour and detail, those memories have now been brought more up to date, as you may have seen last month in the restoration of the Victorian soldier, a veteran of the Crimean War, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Back then, taking photographs was in the hands of a handful of specialists using cumbersome equipment, and processing was done by hand, often in a makeshift tent on the spot. Despite the difficulties, it’s estimated that over a million photographs were taken a little later during the four years of the American Civil War. Though many have survived to provide a unique visual record, most of the glass negatives were recycled to fill panes in greenhouses to be lost forever.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Kodak company invented and introduced the box camera, with its roll of negatives, meaning that shortly photography would be in the hands of the general public, and the days of many individual portrait studios would be numbered.

John Swartz knew the writing was on the wall, and he was open to any opportunity to bolster his business in Main Street, Fort Worth, Texas. So he was grateful when in November 1900, five apparently wealthy, well-dressed strangers came to sit for him. He had no idea his photograph would eventually be seen so widely and still reproduced long after the old Wild West had disappeared into the cowboy books.

He was, however, so pleased with the picture that he printed a large copy and put it in a frame in his window as an advertisement. It caught the attention of local detective Charlie Scott who immediately recognised some of the faces and notified the famous Pinkerton Agency who had been searching for notorious train robbers Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh — better known to us as legends Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The rest, as they say, is history, although with a little bit of artistic licence from Hollywood.

The peril of the unexpected consequences of published images is, therefore, nothing new. However, now with digital imagery and social media, it affects everyone with a mobile device — not just the rich and infamous.

Fortunately, for most, the results are not as terminal as they were for the members of the Hole in the Wall Gang. The reason such images have survived, and are still of sufficient quality to be enhanced, is because they were real hard copies, whether in negative or positive form, even if many of those who had them taken didn’t always appreciate their future value.

Almost the opposite seems to be true of digital files. As so few use them to realise how fragile and short-lived they may be, rely, as they do, on algorithms they do not really understand as well as power and processors, all of which may one day fail them.

Then there is the sheer volume of content to deal with. I first heard the term Digital Asset Management twenty years ago. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how important it would become. But mention DAMs today, and I would guess few would really know what it meant, even among those who should know better. If you have spent any time with a friend or a customer searching vainly for a particular picture on a mobile phone, then you will know exactly why it is important, and why nobody bothers to use it until it’s too late.

I still have boxes of old 35mm negatives, which I can still print from or scan to restore to former glory because they are preserved in their original state, but I have lots of more recent JPGs which are beyond any worthwhile restoration, and more that have just disappeared somewhere on failed hard drives, and redundant memory sticks. Even if I’ve found an old JPG, I’m disappointed to find I’ve only saved a low-resolution email version and not the larger original, so it’s pretty pointless trying to update it because it’s not going to look any better.

So, like most professional photographers, some years ago, I wised up and started shooting in RAW, saving that nondestructive file and only editing a JPG or TIFF copy. That way, there was going to be an original ‘negative’ to go back to. With improving software performance over the years, it was becoming possible to start again from the beginning. How often have you wished you could do that rather than save multiple files with different versions and titles?

Most customer files, of course, are not in RAW and have already been destructively edited by them or the device they are using. By destructive, we mean an action that cannot

be undone, and there is only a limited amount of first aid you can do to make it any better for print. Even if there was a half-decent original camera file, it has probably been deleted, overwritten or just lost in the digital jungle that is most memory banks.

Obviously, your average customer is not expected to understand RAW files — but then that’s your professional advantage. That’s why you are here, to give advice as well as service. And if you have the chance to be proactive, suggest an option for shooting. For example, it’s worth being aware that most reasonable quality cameras and some phones will shoot both RAW and JPG sideby-side. The user doesn’t even have to make the effort of handling RAW; they can just save it and play with the JPG. Then, if needed, they can send you both, and you can match the edits of one with the better quality other.

The magic of RAW is that you haven’t committed any definite properties on it until you chose to. All image files are based on a number of pixels — initially those of the source camera or scanner. When you open the file in Photoshop or any other photo editing suite, you confirm those pixel dimensions as solid fact, as well as other critical settings. Anything you then do, reducing or enlarging, altering exposure values etc., is to one degree or another affecting the file’s quality, so it’s a bit of a trade-off.

With RAW editing, you can adjust all the options before you open or save it, and this is a significant advantage for digital files.

I’ve always been a fan of Adobe Bridge, much underexploited and misunderstood in the industry, as it’s so much more than a browser as it was in its early days and plays a powerful role in RAW editing.

In previous columns, I have shown how the camera RAW filter can still be used for any file already open in Photoshop, but then that file has already been rasterised, so any adjustments are postprocessing, and while it’s still a valuable option, there is a much better one with Bridge.

By right-clicking, you can open files directly from Bridge into Camera RAW; in fact, you can set preferences to do that by default. Most importantly, you can open multiple files, which will appear in a film strip below the individual images to enable batch processing rather than the more laborious one-at-time Photoshop option. Adjustments to one file can be synchronised with another or individually tweaked to suit.

In this way, it operates much like Adobe Lightroom, which uses the same processing engine. While I use Lightroom a lot, it is much more geared to a photographer’s workflow, where lots of similar photos need to be handled, than the print studio, where there may be fewer files but more variety. Bridge also opens folders and creates thumbnails of all the contents, as well as detailed information data like size, date created, origin etc., of all files rather than Lightroom, which can’t include PDFs, InDesign, Word files and the like. It displays the folders in the sequence they are on the hard drive, so it’s much easier to follow the trail to find things and has a powerful search engine, especially if keywords have been added to files to make it easier to identify them.

I’ve mentioned much of this before — Bridge has proved invaluable in cutting through the maze of files and folders in pursuit of that holy grail of Digital Asset Management. But Adobe has gone further in making it a powerful editing tool in its own right by going directly into Camera RAW without the need to open Photoshop with all the demands on computer performance that entails.

In fact, it’s almost as if they reacted to this column of a few months back when I suggested rather rashly that I was somewhat underwhelmed with some of the recent, more trivial updates. This time, in March, they’ve come up with a biggie, which even after a few weeks is getting rave reviews across the board on line, including those ordinarily critical of Adobe’s on-going subscription policy. Other software manufacturers have been nibbling away at the industry leader, so this time they have hit back big time, and for once, something that will be really useful for print output. For the last two years, Lightroom and Photoshop have had automated image enhance features; now, at least for the moment in Camera RAW, there is Super Resolution. And this is not a simple marketing slogan; this really works. Over the years, there have been a number of plug-ins to improve pixel performance, particularly when there seemed to be a particular limit to the number of megapixels you could squeeze into a camera. They all worked to some degree but mainly limited by the number and quality of dots plugged in in the first place. In fact, last month, I was explaining how interpolation worked, sampling surrounding pixels to expand output. Now, exploiting the ever-improving potential of AI, Super Resolution pushes the boundaries of resampling a step further to at least double the size of a digital image and possibly take it up four times without losing quality. At the moment, this can only be done opening Camera RAW through Bridge, not Photoshop, for the reasons mentioned before, though it will no doubt also appear in Lightroom very shortly. This way, it gives sampling the best chance of manipulating pixels without any possible deterioration. By a right-click on the thumbnail in Camera RAW, you get another option to Enhance and a further dialogue box for Super-Resolution together with a preview and estimated time taken — generally about five minutes.

Although it is intended for camera RAW files, it can be used for any pixel file, and after only a brief trial has real benefits for print enlargement. It will take a 6MP phone picture up to 12MP, for example. While that in itself will not make it a better picture, working with a bigger file in RAW or Photoshop makes a big difference because you’ve got many more pixels to play with.

It creates an Enhanced copy, named, so you know exactly which file is which. It can then be opened in Photoshop and compared with the original. Still early days, but I can see this is going to be a big help to the print shop in the continuing challenge to do that little bit extra that the average customer can’t do at home or on their phone.

I’ll update you next month when I’ve had a chance to try SuperResolution of more varied images, but I strongly recommend you try it yourselves and look forward to any feedback.