Breathe new life into forgotten photos with Enhance
Digital Camera UK|October 2024
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
Breathe new life into forgotten photos with Enhance

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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This story is from the October 2024 edition of Digital Camera UK.

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This story is from the October 2024 edition of Digital Camera UK.

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