Wow! Photoshop delivers Super Resolution and Sky Replacement

There’s not much that I need/want to do in post-processing that I can’t do in Lightroom, but with the latest release of Photoshop 2021 two features have been introduced which have introduced a “wow factor”. Both are upgrades to the Adobe Camera RAW engine (which sits under both Photoshop and Lightroom), but neither are available in Lightroom … yet!

To access just Sky Replacement from Lightroom you can use the “Edit in …” option to open your RAW image in Photoshop and then select Sky Replacement from the “Edit menu”. You can then save it back to the folder you loaded the image from, as a PSD format file. Currently, if you want to do Super Resolution – which is of greatest value where you’ve done severe crops, or you have old low-res images, or where you want to print at larger sizes – you need to open the RAW file from Photoshop itself, choose the “Enhance …” option and then save the enhanced image as an object, before saving it back to the folder the original came from. Of course, as I show in this post, you can do the enhance, and then apply the sky replacement for a super wow factor.

You need to remember to import (using the “Add” option) the Photoshop images back into your Lightroom catalog.

[I’ve put a couple of links at the bottom of this post for anyone wishing to read more about both these features.]

The image above has always been a favourite of mine. Taken with my Sony A700 APS-C camera the first time I’d used both a new 100-300mm lens, and had been “educated” to shoot in RAW, there’s not much to dislike about it. I’d cropped it from the original image below, and applied a some global slider edits …

So I was very happy with that image, given that the camera only had a 12Mp sensor. Now along comes Super Resolution, and look what I can do with it, effectively both sharpening it (using the AI technologies in the tool) and increasing the resolution from 1702 x 1135 to 3405 x 2270 pixels. On the web you may not see the enhancement, but on my screen, believe me – you can!

I really like this enhanced resolution image, but just look at how it pops with a little bit of sky replacement added …

Another couple from the same shoot; you don’t need to have a blank sky to do sky replacement, it just happens that these shots were taken with a rather bland sky, and very little direct sunlight …

I’ve chosen another non-enhanced image from the same shoot as the featured image. Here are a couple of links that might be of interest.

How to use Photoshop and Lightroom’s “Super Resolution” Feature (it admits that it isn’t available for Lightroom directly at the moment – but it will be!)

“The results can be amazing.” How Photoshop’s new Super Resolution feature transforms older shots

How to Replace the Sky in a Photo with Photoshop.