Super resolution on smart preview leaves artifacts which don't go away when RAW is available

Forum|Forum|25 days ago
May 31, 2026
3 replies
56 views

I worked with smart preview and used super resolution. This left obvious artifacts in form of grid.

They do not go away when I have RAW available, I discarded smart preview, and even when I disable and re-enable super resolution for that file. (Without super resolution this grid is gone.)

Artifacts are even visible in exports.

These artifacts do not appear on very similar photo with same edits, but which was never edited as a smart preview.

Correct answer Ian Lyons

I believe your issue is due to using Smart Previews with a feature based on AI . Adobe highly recommend that customers work on originals files when using AI based features. Unfortunately, there is no commentary as to what the implications might be if the recommendation is ignored.

I’ve attached a screenshot showing an alert displayed shortly after relaunching LrC that refers to the use of Smart Previews with AI based editing features.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

If you disable Superresolution, then the data remain in your catalog.lrcat-data because they are still cached in History. So try this: Disable Superresolution, then remove all the Superresolution steps from the History. Now first use ‘Optimize Catalog’. This should remove all traces of what you did, so now enabling again should result in a correct operation.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

Ian Lyons

Correct answer

Community Expert

I believe your issue is due to using Smart Previews with a feature based on AI . Adobe highly recommend that customers work on originals files when using AI based features. Unfortunately, there is no commentary as to what the implications might be if the recommendation is ignored.

I’ve attached a screenshot showing an alert displayed shortly after relaunching LrC that refers to the use of Smart Previews with AI based editing features.

M

Michał350566426a8wAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for suggestion. I don’t have this option selected, but it makes clear we can not expect AI tools to work well with smart previews.

I’m surprised that it doesn’t get rid of the artifacts when original RAW is available. There should be some way to regenerate this super-resolution. (Found it: disable super-resolution, restart LrC, re-enable super-resolution, LrC will recompute it).

I’ll just avoid smart previews for now.

PS. This is on LrC 15.3 on Mac.

A

AxelMatt

Community Expert

Unfortunately you haven't given us any information about your system. Therefore, all proposed solutions are a look into the crystal ball

Is your system up-to-date? Do you have installed all recent updates and patches for the operating system and the device drivers, especially the graphic driver. Please make also sure that you have installed the Studio version and not the Game Ready version of your NVidia driver.

Please provide a copy of your 'System Info'. This can be get from the Lightroom menu item Help > System Info. There's a copy button in the System Info dialog. Press this button and paste the info into a text file and attach this file at your next forum post.

Have you try a reset of the Lightroom’s preferences: How to reset Lightroom Classic preferences (adobe.com)

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI

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