Breathe new life into forgotten photos with Enhance

James Paterson tries out Photoshop's AI image-enhancing tools to see if they can rescue an old, noisy, heavily-cropped raw file

- James Paterson

If you're interested in image quality, then you need to know about the Enhance command. It features two of the biggest hitters Adobe has to offer - the Denoise and Super Resolution commands. Unlike the headline-grabbing Generate AI tools, these let us enhance what's already there rather than supplement images with Al-generated fluff.

They are also brilliant for revamping older photos that we might once have dismissed as too noisy. This hummingbird photo is an extreme example. I took it on an old Nikon D800 with a slightly soft lens in 2017. Shot at ISO 6400 and needing a hefty crop, the image was unusable. Seven years later, digital image editing has come on leaps and bounds and, after running the image through Denoise and Super Resolution (it requires a workaround to do both) the image is much cleaner. However, there's still a place for older noise-reduction tools and you need to know your way around the sharpening tools. We'll look at a complete workflow for enhancing old photos, so check your image library and you might find potential in forgotten frames.

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