“Preserve Details” in Photoshop Image Resizing is Seriously Awesome

Adobe has introduced a bunch of new features in the Photoshop CC releases over the course of the year. One feature that I knew about, but hadn’t used much myself was the new “preserve details” upsampling algorithm when resizing images, which was introduced in the spring.  Well, I was just looking into resizing one of my aerial photos of San Francisco for printing, and I was blown away at the output quality when upsampling my image.

Aerial Panorama of San Francisco

I stitched together the panorama from 6 or 7 images captured with a GoPro and DJI Phantom quadcopter (details here). The original panorama image size was 4746×1706 pixels… I wanted to see how big I could make it for large-scale printing, and I upscaled the image by 469% to 22256×8000 using Photoshop’s image resizing features. The results are very impressive.

Here are a few side by side comparisons of different resampling/upscaling algorithms, the new “Preserve Details” algorithm is the last one. While none of them is perfect, the output of the new “preserve details” algorithm produced very good/high quality results. You can adjust the “reduce noise” slider to tweak the resizing algorithm’s output to minimize visual artifacts that may come from the up-sampling process.

Nearest Neighbor Resampling
Nearest Neighbor Resampling
Bicubic-Sharper Resampling
Bicubic-Sharper Resampling
Preserve Details Resampling
Preserve Details Resampling

You can check out the final output by interacting with the image below.  You can zoom in and pan around just by interacting with the image directly. When you zoom in really far, you can see it’s not going to create details that weren’t there in the original picture, but you’ll quickly see this can be immensely useful for upscaling smaller images for printing or other uses.  As a simple game, see if you can spot the Adobe San Francisco office!

Check out more details on the Preserve Details upscaling feature in the video below, from Adobe TV:

So how do you get this awesome up-sampling algorithm?  Just head over to creative.adobe.com and become a member of Adobe Creative Cloud today, and download Adobe Photoshop CC.