Adobe Photoshop's 'super resolution' made my jaw hit the floor

I guess professional photos have always been touched up and this is just an automation of this process. But I've long felt a little odd about the use of machine learning in photography this way. How long before Google Photos recreates dark photos by just reassembling all of the items it believes are there from machine learning?

Hm. So I took the example image, upscaled by 200%, applied a sharpen filter (all in Paint.NET) and compared the result to the AI upscaled image. TBH, I couldn't see a difference.

2x upscaling isn't all that impressive to begin with (e.g. produce 4 pixels from 1) and can be done in fairly high quality using traditional non-learning algorithms.

I'm much more impressed by 4x and 8x super-resolution. I'm really not sure what the big deal is with 2x.

As a metrologist (and photographer), the difficulty with these techniques is that they can over-represent the information contained within an image; they present an image of what was "probably" there, rather than representing what was. These aren't so different from our own brains, which remember what we thought we saw, rather than the light that reached our retinas.

These methods are already in extensive use (most smartphone images use extensive noise-reduction techniques), but we must be ever-cognizant that image-processing techniques can add yet another layer of nuance and uncertainty when we try to understand an image.

Neat. If only Adobe would do away with their absurd pricing models. I'll never use an adobe product again after trying to end my subscription with them.

Absolutely not. If there's not enough information available, there's not enough information, full stop.

Plausible (i.e. "good looking" or "believable") results are not the same as actual data, which is why enhance wouldn't work on vehicle licence plates or faces for example.

Sure, the result might be a plausible looking face or text, but it's still not a valid representation of what was originally captured. That's the danger with using such methods for extracting actual information - it looks fine and is suitable for decorative purposes, but nothing else.