With Photoshop’s new Enhance Super Resolution, many photographers are enlarging their images right out of camera raw. No third party plugins needed, and you get a beautiful result to crop or print. One question we have received a lot is can you use this feature (soon to be released in Lightroom) using jpeg or tiff files. Can you open Adobe Camera RAW even though the files aren’t raw files. The answer is yes, you just have to change some preferences in Photoshop.
With Photoshop open, go to Preferences-File Handling. Once here click on the Camera Raw Preferences….see the red arrow in the image above. You can also scroll to the very bottom of the list in Preferences and click on Camera Raw.
With Camera Raw preferences open, go to the drop down file handling choices for jpeg and tiff at the bottom of the window. Choose to enable both jpeg and tiff support (automatically open…). Now when you open a jpeg or tiff file, Adobe Camera Raw will open and you can choose Enhance Super Resolution. I normally leave jpeg and tiff file support off as I like to know when I am working with a raw file or some other format. You can always use the Camera Raw Filter to work on jpegs and tiff images…but Super Resolution is not available using the Camera Raw Filter. Also, you will always get better results using a raw file since the image hasn’t been saved already as a jpeg or tiff.