If you are here from the Youtube Video then cheers, just jump directly to the ‘Download Assets’ section to the bottom for the downloadable images.
For others, you should watch the step by step video in the end, that would give you much more clarity with live examples.
There are many instances when we want to increase the image resolutions. It might be for print, for viewing in larger screens or just simply to get an upper hand while selling them in stock image websites. Gone are the days when you could only decrease the resolution of the images. Now with the help of A.I. assisted tools you can also increase it. That too without losing any quality. The A.I. tools analyses the images and creates pixels from scratch that compliments the images and prevents any loss of quality. In this article we are gonna discuss about my top 5 image upscalers that I have personally used and am very pleased with. I have also attached high resolution images for you all to see and decide for yourselves which one’s best for you.
Topaz Gigapixel AI
Topaz gigapixel, with its brilliant upscaling capabilities has been the talk of the market for quite some time now. In my experiments I found it to among the top 3 of my choices.
Its main strength is its intuitive and user friendly design coupled with its huge upscaling capabilities. It can upscale up to 600% which is huge. The only downside is that you can’t choose the ppi while exporting and you have to use any other software like Photoshop to change the ppi to 300 or 600 if you want to get the images printed. It also takes away some of the details from the images which seems to be a downer for me.
Adobe Lightroom Classic CC
Adobe Lightroom is on my most favourite list for its seamless and intuitive design and unparallel versatility. Maybe because I have been using Lightroom for so many years I feel so much at home with this. I personally use Lightroom for most my upscales unless I feel limited by its capabilities.
Its pros include a super intuitive design and the ability to upscale numerous images at once. Also this is the only tool that keeps the images as original looking as possible by neither softening the images nor sharpening them. The only place I feel limited is its inability to go beyond 4x upscaling. In cases where I might feel that I need to go higher, I use Chainner along with Lightroom.
Chainner
Chainner is the Black Horse of these 5. This is the only open sourced option among these. That mean you can easily download it from this Github repository and use completely for free. Also being open sourced it is open for all to try and create different models for upscaling. That opens up a world of possibilities. You can download any custom model according to your needs from here. That makes it most versatile of all. It has nearly no cons that I can think of. It is free, open sourced, with a large number of models at its disposal and much more.
The main con of this software is it is pretty taxing on your hardware. You need a somewhat good machine to run it smooth and properly. The only other downside I can think of is its complicated node based workflow. But to be honest, once you learn it, it’s pretty straightforward. There are some really good tutorials about this on Youtube.
Bigjpg.com
This is the closest possible thing to a free upscaler. You don’t even need a pc for this one. As it is web based, you can run it from anywhere including your phone itself. You can just go to the website, upload your images and get going. It can upscale your images up to a whooping 16x, can you believe it? the free version offers 4x upscale and also limits you to 2 parallel upscales at once but for a price of as low as 22$ per year you can easily remove this restrictions. It also has a pc app if you want to know.
It has 2 cons. The first one is being limited to 2 images at any given time unless you pay and thew second one you are dependent upon your internet speed. All other options in this list are offline models but this one being online makes it both better and worse than them. The images upscaled by this one were of the farthest from original with softened and smoothened out details in areas. So, if you are gonna use this you better keep that in mid. Otherwise, for as much as 0$ and no fancy hardware, this offering is impossible to beat.
Photoshop Neural Filter
This one is still in development stage. Therefore, we can’t really say for certain how its capabilities are going to develop at a later stage. But with current capabilities it has pretty solid performance. It uses the Photoshop Neural Filter named ‘Superzoom’ to use A.I. assistance to upscale the images. You can use the technique to upscale it over and over again until the image starts to lose significant details. It also softens the areas little bit therefore losing quality.
Downloadable Assets
Now, the time to compare them against each other. You can download the files and compare them for yourselves. For me, Lightroom is still best option because of its effortless workflow and truest to the original upscale. If you want to learn in more detail about the tools, go watch the video linked to this page. Keep Creating.
