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

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

#101

Post by powersnail »

kqr wrote: post #68
roughly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider photos taken by cell phones, it's hard to really say what "as the camera takes them" means - a lot of ML-driven retouching happens "automagically" with most modern cell phones already and I'd expect more in the future.

It goes even further than that. Image sensors don't capture images. They record electricity that can be interpreted as an image. This might seem like a quibble, but once you dive a little deeper into it, you realise that there's enormous latitude and subjectivity in the way you do that interpretation. What's even crazier is that this didn't come with digital photography. Analogue film photography has the same problem…

There is a difference in the degree of subjectivity. In interpreting electricity, it's highly localized, and probably doesn't affect the macro structure of the image.

With ML-enhanced photos, you might have a distanced face that is "enhanced" by the model, to become a face that wasn't there. Or a fingerprint, a birthmark, a mole, etc.

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

#102

Post by hansoolo »

intricatedetail wrote: post #56

I hate articles where author shows an option but won't actually tell where it is located in the application. I spent 10 minutes looking for it in latest PS and couldn't find it. Then I clicked at link to related article about "Enhance Details" and it seems like the option could be in Lightroom instead? I tried to use it myself because the illustrations in the article don't look to impressive, but authors enthusiasm g…

It said "Adobe camera raw" from the beginning and even had a screenie showing the menu point...

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

#103

Post by TimBurr »

Someone wrote: post #89

I suggest to read the Adobe blogpost at https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/03/10/from-the-acr-te... instead. It has sample images side-by-side with bicubic upsampling. Even better comparisons are in the blog post for a competing product: https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2019/12/17/all-about-the-new... (likely the same algorithm, but using a different training set, so results will be different from what Adobes prod…

A few examples in the blog post stood out to me - both refine ambigous letters to clear ones, which demonstrates concerns other folks were talking about in this thread.

In this one, i's are nearly illegible, but are corrected. It appears to be correct here, but could be wrong.

https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_fa6ee5a67d3f2e5b1945745176e6b955e...

This one's weirder. In the original, I can't read many of the letters. It looks like G[EL]NE[XR]A[IL]DI[ER][XK][IT]OR - lots of guesses. The enhanced version is GENERALDIREKTOR (I think). At any rate, it's much more confident in the spelling than I am, as a human.

https://blog.adobe.com/hlx_a337d462293b51f4d91182cbbebf68cf4...

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

#104

Post by dr_zoidberg »

roughly wrote: post #53
smnrchrds wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope such photos are submitted as camera takes them. With our without this new feature, photoshopping a photo before presenting it to court must be illegal.

If you consider photos taken by cell phones, it's hard to really say what "as the camera takes them" means - a lot of ML-driven retouching happens "automagically" with most modern cell phones already and I'd expect more in the future.

I'm surprised nobody cited yet the Gigapixel AI-"Ryan Gosling" case from last year: https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

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

#105

Post by bscphil »

Someone wrote: post #89

I suggest to read the Adobe blogpost at https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/03/10/from-the-acr-te... instead. It has sample images side-by-side with bicubic upsampling. Even better comparisons are in the blog post for a competing product: https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2019/12/17/all-about-the-new... (likely the same algorithm, but using a different training set, so results will be different from what Adobes prod…

> It has comparisons with nearest neighbor, bilinear and Lanczos filters and uses a slider to make it easier to see the difference.

Really glad to see they included Lanczos. It's extremely frustrating to those in the know to see comparisons that only use subpar algorithms. The worst only use a B-spline or nearest-neighbor upscale, and end up looking like one of those eyeglass prescription ads for seniors. Something like Lanczos is the minimum acceptable, I think.

Adobe's bicubic produces obvious severe artifacts, I assume it's something like a Catmull-Rom spline cubic.

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

#106

Post by neogodless »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
ISL wrote: post #6

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 s…

What worries me is that COTS photo equipment increasingly comes with these algorithmic retouches that "over-represent" the data - or, put another way, bake its own interpretation into image, in a way that cannot be distinguished from source data. It's nice for a casual Instagrammer, but then a lot of science and engineering also gets done using COTS equipment. I worry that at some point, a lot of money will be burned…

I did a web search for "cots" and learned that a cot is...

> a small usually collapsible bed often of fabric stretched on a frame

But in this case, COTS is apparently...

> commercial, off-the-shelf

In other words "photo equipment" or "consumer/retail photo equipment."

Upon further reading[0] it seems odd to use the term here, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something. It's often used for software and has a key phrase...

> packaged solutions which are then adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization

But it's possible the term has been co-opted to mean something else now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_off-the-shelf

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

#107

Post by Izkata »

gmfawcett wrote: post #33
social_quotient wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like systems that add zeros (floating point math) to the right of the decimal. 18.00000 is not the same as 18. Thoughts?

That's not how floating point math works? At least not for standard floats (IEEE 754), and except for very large integers (near 2^m, where m is the mantissa of the FP type). Floats have an exact representation for integers within their mantissa range -- i.e., '18' is exactly the same as '18.0000'.

They're correct when it comes to scientific fields - the number of significant figures is important, so 18.0 and 18.000 really do mean different things.

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

#108

Post by intricatedetail »

hansoolo wrote: post #102
intricatedetail wrote: post #56

I hate articles where author shows an option but won't actually tell where it is located in the application. I spent 10 minutes looking for it in latest PS and couldn't find it. Then I clicked at link to related article about "Enhance Details" and it seems like the option could be in Lightroom instead? I tried to use it myself because the illustrations in the article don't look to impressive, but authors enthusiasm g…

It said "Adobe camera raw" from the beginning and even had a screenie showing the menu point...

But how do I open this Adobe camera raw thing?

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

#110

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

rozab wrote: post #61
roughly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this point is worth pushing on a bit harder, which is to say that the "additional details" in the picture are guesses by the software, not actual additional details. The data present in the picture is fixed, the software uses that data to build educated guesses on what was actually there. If the photo doesn't contain enough data to actually determine what a given piece of text in the image says, the software…

In some use cases, like OCR, the accuracy of these guesses can be established in a scientific way. And it tends to be very good.

I'm not sure about the OCR example, but there are information / sampling theory limits on what can be discerned in an image, based on sampling rate (pixels basically) and optics. Any extrapolation outside these limits is proveably guessing.

Edit - re OCR do you mean e.g. from a picture of a blurred license plate we could rule in or out a subset of possible numbers, depending on how blurred, like a B could be a 8 but not a L? (And sorry if your example is unrelated). This is valid, and unrelated to super resolution, you can do this analysis with Nyquist and point spread functions.

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