Last week review 08-2024

Last week in review 08-2024 and it is very stormy and very rainy all the time, and too warm for February 🙂

This week’s topic was the “Superzoom” filter in Photoshop CC. Like the “Upscale” filter in Luminar NEO or “Enhance Photos” in Lightroom Classic, this filter ensures that you can generate a photo with a correspondingly higher resolution. This creates a photo with twice the resolution and with Photoshop and the Luminar NEO extension you can generate even higher resolutions.

As you could read in the article, the Superzoom filter has to admit defeat in a direct comparison, while the other two in Luminar and in Lightroom Classic are very close to each other or on a par, depending on the subject. Lightroom is clearly the faster tool here, but the Luminar extension also produces very good results.
Even if the Luminar NEO extension can also calculate higher resolutions,

I would consider 2x magnification to be a kind of limit that makes sense and also leads to reasonable results with these tools. Further magnification then causes the sharpness to drop, which can then no longer be repaired by an AI.

This week was also the week of Adobe updates. This applies at least to Lightroom Classic, Photoshop CC and Adobe Camera RAW.

The innovations themselves are quite sparse, in Photoshop CC it is the text spacing or new presets, in Lightroom Classic it is additional filter and sorting options in the smart collections. In addition, of course, newer cameras and lenses are supported, but this manifests itself primarily in the support of new cell phone cameras. This is where the criticism of the subscription model comes in again, that you can hardly implement new functions every 1/2 year. But in view of the fact that you can get photography regularly for around €80/year, I don’t want to complain.

This week Sigma announced a 500mm/5.6 telephoto lens for Sony E-mount as well as for the L-mount. We’ll have to wait and see how it performs in terms of sharpness and AF, but just under $3,000 for such a lens is quite a lot. My Sigma 150-600/5.0-6.3 was almost a bargain and I’m very happy with its sharpness in particular, so I won’t be giving it away again. And my zoom is also marked as suitable for conversion, so I would have the same options here and with 100mm more I would even be a bit more flexible.

All in all, another very eventful week. I hope you enjoy the articles and look forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche