Red Tailed Hawk undergoing convolutional neural networking

This shot is one from my hawk and snake series. I took it seven years ago with the low resolution and rather antiquated Nikon D40x and a Nikkor 70-300 ƒ4.5-5.6 lens. If I had known what I would have run into perhaps I would have brought a better lens along but we aren't granted such foresight.

Even though I got some stunning shots that day, the picture quality is less than optimal. I decided to do something different yesterday and use Adobe Lightroom's relatively new Enhance feature. This is the now enhanced image above.

I used the Super resolution option. I believe that AI is used for this upscaling. They call it CNN, a convolutional neural network.

 “The new Enhance Details feature available in Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom CC approaches demosaicing in a new way to better resolve fine details and fix issues like false colors and zippering. Enhance Details uses machine learning—an extensively trained convolutional neural network(CNN)—to provide state-of-the-art quality for the images that really matter. Enhance Details works well on both Bayer (Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc) and X-Trans (Fujifilm) raw mosaic filters.” 

I have eschewed such technology but thought this would be a good opportunity to try it out because the pictures always struck me as a lost opportunity.

I can't say it is perfect, in fact it is far from perfect but it did improve things a little bit. I will play around a little more with it. Here are a few of the great shots of the sequence, with the same enhanced technology applied.