Lightroom Classic CC "enhance details" - what does it do??

theoldsmithy

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Cheshire, England
Name
Martin Connolly
I've recently received quite a few newsletters telling me that the new "enhance details" feature is marvellous. I've tried it on a few images, and as far as I can see, it does absolutely nothing at all. Sorry, I should say, it makes the MacBook fan turn on for a minute or two and a progress bar moves. The resulting image looks identical to the original. Has anyone else give this a try? Does the emperor really have no clothes or have I missed the splendour of the new outfit?
 
I tried it, here's a copy of what I wrote on TalkEmount:

Beware! I installed the Lightroom, Camera Raw and Photoshop updates and after that the Edit in Photoshop option didn't work anymore, Adobe simply broke it. Adobe has acknowledged the problem, which apparently sits in Camera Raw 11.2; according to one user reverting to 11.0 fixes the problem. On reverting to the previous Photoshop version I lost my settings; I restored a bootable backup to my Mac because I didn't want to try to remember what settings and presets I had made. Wasn't fun, but went smooth enough. I'll wait for the next update, which will come soon enough, I guess. A lot of users complained already.

As to the Enhance Details, I tried that on a number of photos with very fine details; think perfectly focussed pictures with the Loxia 2/35 at f/8 in the centre. In some cases I could see a difference, but only at 4x magnification on my 27" 5K screen. Maybe, just maybe, I'll use it occasionally for large prints with lots of fine details. The resultant DNG file is about 4x as large as the original compressed Sony raw from the A7R2.
 
I watched a Matt Koslowski YouTube video about it, Lightroom updates, and he comes to pretty much the same conclusion as Addieleman. I tried it on an M43 raw file and could notice, at about 400%, a slight increase in detail, as if you bumped up the clarity slider slightly. I will likely only use it if I'm going to order a large print.
Also of note, Tony Northrup shows evidence in this video, Lightroom Enhance Details, that Fuji XTrans filter format leaves LR to guess the color for enhancing detail and that correct color in the enhanced file is a hit or miss.
 
it's not working at all for me. All it does is turn my photos blue. (adding a raster of blue dots over the entire image)
Guess the "Artificial Intelligence" on my computer is going through its "Blue Period" :-D
 
I've never used it. I updated my LR to the latest version and found that it simply refused to open. After a lot of faffing about and some online help from Adobe, I had to reinstall v8. They tell me that my system isn't fast enough to support the latest version and that if I upgrade to Mojave it will be "like new" ! Don't think I'll bother....
 
I tried it on an X-T3 RAF of my dog. First impressions were that it had LESS detail than the original, but I think that this was a glitch in the comparison view in LR.

It took about 5 mins to process and is 120MB (the original RAF is 27MB). Zooming in I didn't see any extra detail, so this doesn't seem like a great feature to me.

I'm not sure what Adobe are aiming at with this, though I know that the Fuji user base is very vocal about Adobe processing and there seem to be more alternative products being offered up as LR replacements. So maybe they are genuinely worried about losing market share.
 
I tried it on an X-T3 RAF of my dog. First impressions were that it had LESS detail than the original, but I think that this was a glitch in the comparison view in LR.

It took about 5 mins to process and is 120MB (the original RAF is 27MB). Zooming in I didn't see any extra detail, so this doesn't seem like a great feature to me.

I'm not sure what Adobe are aiming at with this, though I know that the Fuji user base is very vocal about Adobe processing and there seem to be more alternative products being offered up as LR replacements. So maybe they are genuinely worried about losing market share.
I also thought that if anything there were one or two areas with less detail. That was on a Canon RAW file, I haven’t tried a Fuji file yet though.
 
It does well with X-Trans raw files as I tested, yields results as detailed as Iridient X-Transformer. For my Canon raw files it does more harm than good, I've seen it adding colour fringing around highlights.
 
I just tried out the "enhance details" with a very sharp image I made with the X100F. At 3X magnification in Lightroom its very sharp. With the "enhance details" used on the same image I can see no appreciable difference. I did this using a 15" MacBook Pro running an i7 processor, 16gigs of RAM with Intel Iris Pro graphics. It taxed the machine to the max.
It may be handy for images that are just a bit off the mark be it because of less than perfect optics or simply a slightly missed focus. However, on images that are fine to begin with with only "normal" Lightroom correction used, I probably wouldn't bother with the option.
'Just thinking out loud here.
. . . David
 
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I'm afraid the new Enhance feature doesn't really work for me.
My GPU is a poor video RAM of1gb but even using the CPU option I only get a Black Preview in LR Classic ,CC and Photoshop/Camera Raw

There are many similar reports but no answers yet .. just a fix to force LR to use open GL
 
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