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Photoshop's Generative Upscale
5 August 2025
Last week's slide show revisited Nikon 900 images, which are 1280x960-pixel captures. Pretty small by today's standards. And yet we cropped a few to focus on some details of the laser-cut models. We thought those crops might profit from Photoshop beta's new Generative Upscale.
Our smallest crop, which was our consequently our leading candidate, was just 349x429.
We ran it through Generative Upscale under the Image menu. There are three options in the beta: 2x, 3x, or 4x.
We were only trying to get the longest dimension (429 pixels) to 800 pixels, so we selected 2x. That wasn't a problem for the beta, which advised neither dimension may exceed 4096 pixels.
Original. It's a smaller crop. Which is why we wanted to enlarge it for the slide show.
Photoshop generated the enlargement and we resized it to 800 pixels in the long dimension.
But we weren't happy enough with the result to use it in the slide show, preferring the smaller image.
Despite some Smart Sharpening, it wasn't sharp. And the smoother panels looked grainy.
A few days later we wondered what the difference might have been if we'd just used the old trick of enlarge in 110 percent steps to get to 800 pixels. So we tried that.
As you can see in the 800p-deep comparison above, there is a small detectable difference. The 110 version looks a tiny bit noisier but a tiny bit sharper than the generative version. Neither is anything to write home about.
We wondered if 349x429 (seen here) too small a source image to upscale.
Well, any image is too small to upscale. And when you try, you'll find you lose sharpness and the smoother areas of the image become grainy. It's just the price you pay for upscaling. And never worth it.
We're not done experimenting, though. We thought we'd try to upscale the full image and crop that. And try 3x and 4x upscaling.
So stay tuned. More to learn.