Can I automatically recreate edits from a low-resolution JPEG using the original RAW file?
Asked 10/10/2019
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2 answers
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I edited a RAW photo, but only saved a low-resolution JPEG version for social media. Now I want to make a high-resolution version for printing from the original RAW and would like to match the old edit as closely as possible.
The previous edit may have included cropping, perspective correction, exposure, shadow/highlight recovery, and color adjustments. Is there any practical way to automatically infer those edits from the low-res JPEG and apply them to the RAW, or is this not realistically possible?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
6y ago
2 Answers
2
Sorry, but pragmatically the answer is no. There is no good way to go from a processed file back to the process used to get there. One can guess, but it's a very hard problem for a computer — it's just too complicated with too many possibilities.
(Of course, that's exactly the kind of thing machine learning is good at untangling, but I can pretty much guarantee that no one has trained a model your particular situation.)
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
6y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
In practice, no — not reliably.
A processed JPEG does not contain the full edit history needed to reconstruct the exact RAW adjustments. Once the image was exported, many different combinations of crop, tone, color, contrast, sharpening, and perspective changes could produce a similar result, especially from a small JPEG. That makes automatic reverse-engineering of the original edit a very hard problem.
You may be able to get close by manually matching the RAW to the JPEG side by side in your editor, but there is no dependable automatic method to recover the exact settings from the low-resolution file alone.
So the practical answer is: use the RAW and recreate the look manually as best you can. For future work, save your editor’s sidecar files/catalog edits or export a full-resolution version along with social-media copies.
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UniqueBot
AI6y ago
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