Retouching Historic Photos with Super Resolution in Photoshop

4 min readApr 19, 2021

Before and after images zoomed in using Super Resolution and retouching.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been experimenting with photos from my grandfather’s time in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Early this year, Adobe released an update including a new feature, Super Resolution. Super Resolution is enables artificial intelligence to upscale your images up to 4x. It works with RAW-DNG images, JPEG, TIFF and GIFs.

I wondered whether this could help or hinder the retouching process, so I gave it a try.

When I originally scanned these images in 2002, I imagined that the originals would someday end up in a roadside museum in Montana, or an archive. Still can’t believe I had the wherewithal to scan them as 4.6K files at 300dpi! The digitized image scans aren’t prefect, but the quality is pretty good and definitely enough to work with. The original digital images were scanned as PSD files and saved to a stack of Iomega Zip Drives (membah dem?). Sadly, the original photos were destroyed in the early 2010s, after my grandfather passed away, but the digital copies have made their way to every new backup drive and computer that I’ve owned.

The recent controversial trend of converting historic photos and films into upscaled, stabilized video for museums and research gave me the idea to try and do the same. Thanks to the inspiring Denis Shiryaev and his predecessors, for your interesting work.

Upscaling using Super Resolution can be tricky if you don’t have RAW or DNG files already.

Plus, the Enhance (Super Resolution) feature is pretty difficult to find unless you really want to find it, or are familiar with the DNG conversion workflow. And since I’ve never converted a PSD to a DNG, I wasn’t even sure it would work. The good news is, it is possible:

How to Enhance a .psd file using Super Resolution

Open PSD file in Photoshop.

Convert PSD to TIFF (uncompressed) using the non-destructive “Save As…”

In Photoshop, go to Photoshop > Preferences > Camera Raw… > File Handling > TIFF: Automatically open all supported TIFFs > Click OK

Open the newly rendered TIFF in Photoshop — The Camera Raw plugin will now launch your TIFF

Right-Click on the image and select “Enhance” (This is where the cool stuff happens!) The Enhance Preview window launches, and enables a toggle view showing the before/after.

When you are ready, click “Enhance” and a new DNG named “[FILENAME]-Enhanced.dng” will be created and saved to the original file’s corresponding folder. Depending on the level of detail in your imagery, the file may take a while to render. My original scanned file was 18MP and 4982x3609 at 300dpi. The new file is 9964x7218 and 72MP.

Side Note: Shout-out to Curtis Pyke for posting this great Super Resolution tutorial on YouTube

Issues: Noise artifacts are getting introduced as I lever up the contrast, texture, clarity, dehaze and sharpness, and this is especially noticeable in the black regions. This adds tedious work of spot healing to the process. Workflow improvement suggestions are welcome.

Feature Requests to Adobe: I would like to see some improvements, perhaps with Neural Filters introducing more features that can help de-speckle, de-artifact, and analyze for scratches, creases and stains in the image. I also tried to colorize the image, which was a disaster. The skin analysis was inaccurate, and while it was able to capture faces, it completely missed colorizing people’s limbs. It’s a difficult engineering problem, and I have a ton of respect for the engineers working on these kinds of projects. I look forward to seeing the technology develop.

My goal is to convert around 30 images over the next few months and post them on a website for anyone to enjoy. Until then, I will continue to noodle on the workflow and improve the process.

I’m new to this kind of work, and totally open to feedback. If you have any tips or tricks for getting the most out of these images, I’d love to hear about them.