Tony I've been using your Super Res 200% PS action for my lab's research. It's surprisingly effective when taking handheld camera shots at the oculars of a low mag stereo microscope. Thanks for providing this great script, I'll have to cite you in the methods of my next publication!
Following your earlier tutorial on stacking for moon shots, I figured out the 200% trick & used it from a tripod, figuring that the moon’s motion would add plenty of shift. It worked well for noise reduction. BUT subtracting or toggling visibility on pairs of input images demonstrated that atmospheric turbulence at my very low altitude changes the apparent size & separation of craters. So a bulk shift for each image doesn’t align everything, and didn’t get to super-resolution. Hadn’t thought about applying the method to earthly subjects. Cool idea! Thanks for the photoshop action!
I read an article about exactly this in a printed photograpy magazine mid 90ths, when the first digital cameras came into all the camera shops. Later searched in the Internet and never found anything again. Gladly today found this video.
The fact, that you guys created the best photo learning books I have seen plus run your great YT channel with all the free tips, is simply awesome. But now, when you just throw in your free-to-download script, which saves everyone so much time trying to figure it out ... I am lost for words. Thank you!
Hi Tony. Thanks very much for sharing your Photoshop action. It saves everyone a huge amount of time. I have used it now to greatly improve stills from my Mavic Air. I have averaged burst shots before to clean away noise, but this process does recover a lot more detail. Ghosting of moving objects is a limitation, but I can work with it. Thanks again. Adam
Moiré is actually the broken line effect. This is where a line is not a single line from point A to B. It consists of many lines making up the line. This has the effect that certain scenes have strange effects like shimmering. I hope this helps. BTW Chromatic aberrations are the green and/or red fringing.
The 400% and 800% option are very likely to freeze/crash your PS. That happened to me even with a 2TB SSD scratch disk and 64GB of RAM. The way round this is to go to the preferences in photoshop and change cache levels and cache tiles size to maximum! Then it works. Still takes a while, but at least it doesn't freeze out! (it did max out my RAM though!). There is a meaningful difference between 200 and 800, so if you're gonna bother with superresulotion, you may as well go all the way. :)
Strong similarity to the 3dfx Voodoo 5 graphics card! It would render 4 individual images, slightly offset, and then combine it into one image. It was their high end anti-aliasing technology.
Thanks Tony, really appreciate you putting together this resource for all of us. I want to print large prints in the future and this is great. Love the SDP book!
In 2021 you can buy second-hand the camera Tony mentioned, the Nikon D3300, WITH a Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 G DX lens for less than $500 and use it to create images anywhere from 96MP to 186MP. A 96MP 2:3 image will print at 300dpi 40" x 27". The D3300 is six years old but still great camera and the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 G DX lens is very sharp.
Steven, the software does all the alignment automatically as the sky moves through the frame, just like Photoshop does in these examples. Google "deep sky stacker drizzle"
Or you do what real astronomers do and use something like a German equatorial mount to track the Earth's rotation. Then you can take hundreds of images over many nights and stack them. There is still some alignment that has to be done, but nothing extreme and you get a huge reduction in noise and a big boost in signal.
Yeah without a proper star tracking rig it gets hard to align the stars for averaging if you're shooting on a wide angle lens. I've done it before, but photoshop's autoalign doesn't cut it. I end up masking out the foreground and aligning the stars manually which takes hours when you have 20 something frames. Much easier to just get a star tracker and expose for longer.
Image averaging can actually work awesomely well for very noisy images like, say, .. smartphone pictures ! I did try on s8 low light shots, and while the whole process is really cumbersome, especially since smartphone are typically used for quick and easy photography, the result can be truly astonishing in how much noise is reduced ! You end up with a DSLR-like noised image from a smartphone.
I went out and took 30 pics of the waxing crescent moon today and this worked great! This will be so great for pictures of the Jan 31st super blue blood moon! Thanks Tony!
Hi Tony, I have used the action a lot and love it but I reset my photoshop and lost the action. Now the link doesn't appear to work. Is there another way to download it? Thank you
Thanks Tony, its a really really useful technique, thanks so much for introducing it to me! It is worth noting that when stacking 30+ image in order to simulate a long exposure using averaging it takes a lot of hard drive space during the landing process (over 100gb for me). If there isn't enough free disk space (a SSD makes a huge difference here) then I have found photoshop either really slows down or crashes.
Hey Tony, you should do a video with the Pentax 645z or Fuji GFX 50s and use these techniques to compare to the new Hasselblad superresolution, just as you made a video comparing an old Pentax and the Nikon D810.
Ha Ha - Glad to see Tony and Chelsea have been doing research into " The Mating Mind - How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature". The photo examples where Tony uses the bookcase for sharpness comparisons never fails to give me insights and make me chuckle :)
Tony - I always thought you did techy/computer stuff - but I guess I just assumed that because you worked for Microsoft - and of course, because of the fact that you are a super geek :)
Moiré is the interference pattern effect. Lateral chromatic aberration is the red and green fringing. And there's also axial/ longitudinal chromatic aberration being the purple fringing seen around high;y contrasting objects. A tutorial on these with ways to help reduce the effects could be a good subject for a video?
First im really bad at photoshop so trying this is the first time I actually up res-ed an image, did this with 3 handheld shots of a castle taken on Olympus camera and the 200 % pass crashed my graphics display but made the tiff ( old computer), in some areas its subtile but in others its a huge improvement. now i can be a m.4/3 pixel peeper Ha.
Sounds like what the tiny DxO One camera does to make the most of it’s 1-inch sensor in low light. It basically takes 4 Raw files in quick succession and package it up for development later in the computer by averaging the 4. It works well, even hand-held, in my tests. The downside, being a proprietary package (though basically a Zip archive), you have to use their software to develop the Super-Raw file. But you can save a 16-bit Tiff and edit in something else. I expect if you were determined, you could unzip the .dxo package and extract the dogs and average them yourself, but seems too much hassle.
Seems like a promising technique, but it would be really great if you explained just a bit about what was actually going on. If it's not some kind of image averaging, then what is it. How is the extra resolution achieved. Thanks for another good video.
Go search for Ian Norman and image stacking or super resolution. He goes into great detail about it. I assume the action just copies the manual work that Ian explains in his video
I was listening to this video while driving (don't tell anyone) and mostly just listening. I can see that the technique is shown on the slide behind you, but since you don't actually describe the technique in words, I didn't notice. Thanks for replying :-)
Please add a feature request for "higher and/or flexible # of shots with a camera's self timing feature" to any such list you maintain for the camera manufacturers. Seems it would be easy to put "5 sec 20 shot" (or more) into a firmware update.
Tony you added TEN images as layers in Photoshop, but when Photoshop opened, only FOUR images are listed in the lower right corner? In my case, with current versions of the programs as of today, I only see TWO images in the layers panel...(and it's always the last two I selected in Lightroom). Keep in mind I'm a semi-noob in Photoshop. :) Thanks...
Hi Tony, Thanks for doing this video, I'm trying this technique with some older photos that I took multiples of on a tripod. I have a question on the computer processing of this though. Photoshop is only using 10% of my cpu for most of the rendering time on this, and I don't think I have any major bottlenecks (6700k @ 4.5GHz, 16GB RAM @ 2666MHz, editing on SATA SSD). I haven't tried using gpu acceleration yet, but I've got an RX480 if that would help. At any rate, do you know what would cause this much of a bottleneck in performance for my cpu?
I believe that google is using a neural network (PixelCNN or some variant) to interpolate “super resolution” from low resolution images. I’m curious if you’ve played with this at all and compared it to these more traditional techniques? I think there are some public implementations floating around
Here is a link to a detailed description of the technique, and how it works: photoncollective.com/enhance-practical-superresolution-in-adobe-photoshop By the way, Ian notes that tapping the camera while its on a tripod is actually less efficient than simply hand-holding your camera and taking a bunch of images. The natural motion of your hand is not too much for this to work, it's actually preferable.
Not fully understanding the reasoning for tapping the camera between shots? Seems like you shouldn't touch the camera between shots. I also would use silent shooting if possible. The rIII uses silent shooting for pixel shifting to prevent camera shake between images.
So... When doing panorama, could I just do 70% overlap and do average stacking, median sharpening, superresolution and stiching to get crazy resolution? I am asking about using a ultra low resolution long wave infared camera with fixed focus wide lens and getting more resolution.
I see the benefit in noise reduction, but isn't there actually less details in the SuperRes pictures?? For example the SuperRes picture at 8:30 is more blurry.
Hey Tony and Chelsea, i make a lot of 360 photo's and i am wondering whats a good dslr and wide angle lens to use for this purpose. I would like optimal results. Do you have a suggestion? Thanks.
I'm wondering how this technique compares to Topaz Labs A.I. Gigapixel? Of course Gigapixel does it's magic with just one image, but if a person CAN take multiple images...
Just tried to download the action set. I get a message saying not compatible with this version of Photoshop. I have the latest version from creative cloud
Hey Tony, I could not complete the action due to not having the plugin "mean" i have failed to find this plugin so far. any help would be great. thanks
Speaking of trading off computing time (we used to run Photoshop on 3 machines at once, waiting for jobs to re-render) just how much CPU and GPU are you using or considering adequate for this work? Do Xeon CPUs make any difference? And having enough RAM, to prevent disk swapping, does that still mean 3x-4x at much RAM as the size of your original image file(s)?
Always interesting, Tony. Thanks. It seems to me we can also use, to get more resolution, the Brenizer method (with the same limit if Something is moving in the picture) ?
Hi! I have no problem with 200% 400%, but Photoshop is always stuck at align step with 800%. I begin with 14 pictures and reduce to 8 pictures but it doesn't work either. No problem with RAM (6gb used by Photoshop and can use up to 12gb) and no problem with disk space too (still 200gb free space remaining). Any hint to unlock 800% please?
why does doing 400% or 800% increase resolution even more? shouldn't 200% already extract all the information possible with a bayer pattern that's only 2x2 subpixels?
Hi unfortunately the sdp.io/pixelshift link doesn't work. How do you process the high res files from the Olympus Em1 mk ii. If i trie to open them with the Olympus high res plugin in PS CS6 photoshop just crashes.
Is there any solution without PS? I would like to use superresolution for scanning film with DSLR, but I dont want to get into PS just because of this one thing.
Can this SuperRes technique work in tandem with HDR techniques? For example, if you set your camera to shoot bracketed exposures shoot the bracketed shots multiple times. Maybe combine the sets of bracketed exposures into a set of HDR frames first, then do the SuperRes process on those HDR frames. Now if you could combine this whole process into a single script, you'd have time to go to lunch while it all cooks down to one frame. :)
That's an option that I tested. There's a little more noise and the movement often ends up really weird (like partially formed heads and bodies with no arms) but its easy enough to modify my action if you want to try it.
