EASILY enhance image quality in Lightroom

[raphaels28255986]

Hi guys,

The subjetc of this post - as everyone already knows, is the title of an article in Adobe that shows us how to increases the file size of images in our Photos (or any other) librairy and allows these skimpy files to take their rightful place in our LR (or any other) library as heftier files. The process for doing so is pretty straightforward.

But I wonder whether this New, Improved file is of as good a quality as if its new size were, in fact, its native size - or whether there is noticeable loss somewhere as a result of bulking the file up. I print to 17x22 - and sometimes larger, and the response to this question is important to me.

The reason I am asking is because my Lumix GH5M2 is now shooting files that are around 4.5 MB for no apparent reason, instead of its normal 20 MB factiry setting. And, of course, I am not entirely sure how to set it back to 20MB without erasing all the other settings which took a while to personalize.

Thanks a lot.

[Per Berntsen · Accepted solution]

The Enhance/Super resolution feature will double the pixel dimensions of the image.

It does a pretty good job, but it's not the same quality as you'll get with a file straight from the camera with those dimensions. After all, these new pixels (75% of the pixels in the image) have to be invented in the process.

If file sizes have dropped from 20 to 4.5 MB, you have probably set the camera to shoot jpg instead of raw files.

The pixel dimensions are probably the same as for the raw files, so there should be need to use Super resolution.

How large you can print an image does not depend on the file size, but on the pixel dimensions.

However, the jpg format uses lossy (destructive) compression to create small files, and they have much less editing headroom than raw files. So if you want the best possible quality, shoot raw.

[raphaels28255986]

Thank you Per. makes sense to me.

FYI, I looked into Image Quality on my camera and found it set on Fine - and switched back to RAW. Should work now :). Don't know how it changed. Amnesia perhaps?  

Thanks a lot.