How To Install and Upscale Your Images With Chainner

Are you tired of paying hefty subscription fees every month, just to upscale your images? Are you afraid to take the plunge to buy a pricey software that you might need to upgrade in next two or three years?

Does this sound like a sales pitch to you? Well, it certainly isn’t.

Today I’m gonna explain to you about a software that is absolutely free and that is as good as, if not better than, industry leaders like topaz gigapixel and Adobe Lightroom. Also with the access to a large library of different open sourced models, it is very easy to fine tune and find the perfect model for a particular image.

How to install chaiNNer?

To install the software, let’s first head into the GitHub Repository. There are several different versions of the software. You should click on the latest available version. it takes you to the download page. There you can select the download file according to your operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux… etc) and install it.

Before we can get started we need to download a few more things. Let’s go to here to the download icon. Click on it. here you can see there are three things that needs to be downloaded to get this working. You can find them by clicking on the ‘Manage Dependencies Icon on the top right corner of the chaiNNer interface. It looks like a download icon. There you can see the option to download PyTorch, NCNN & ONNX. You just have to click on them to get them downloaded.

Now you will need some upscaler models. Chainner is just a framework. The models do the actual work. Here I have attached the link to the model database. There are lots and lots of models for you to choose from. You can choose any of that, download that and use them.

Now, type on the search bar, Load image, drag it in chaiNNer workspace. This is where you will add your images. Now you need to bring your model in. You can search there with writing ‘Model’, under PyTorch, ‘Load model’. Just bring it in there. Let’s search for ‘upscale’ there. Under PyTorch again ‘upscale image’. Now go for ‘save image’.

First let’s bring in your image, left click on ‘load image’, select image. Next import the model. Left click there. Select model.. Now let’s drag the image node to upscale image. Similarly with model, let’s drag it here in the model Tab and then let’s bring the output to save image here. Here you have to put an image name for that. Right now I’m just writing output. You also have to specify a directory where you want your images to be exported. Let’s select folder now let’s play the sequence. As you can see, it’s completed. Let’s go to the folder. Here is the output image. If you just go to the properties, you can see the image has been upscaled to 4096 by 4096.

How to Upscale multiple Images Together on chaiNNer?

Now, just upscaling one image at once is not gonna do it for you, right? You need to upscale a batch of images, a lot of images all together at once. Well, depending on how well your PC can perform obviously. Now, let’s see how we can upscale batch images at once in Chainner. Now search for ‘Image file iterator’. Just bring it in here. You can see there is already one load image option. This one loads multiple images all at once and just like before load model, upscale image, save image. You need to bring in two more dishes to the plate. First, search for ‘math’ and next is ‘text append’. Why are this important? Well, you will learn in a minute. We choose our model here. Instead of selecting a specific image we select a specific folder. Let’s select folder, and it is gonna import all the images in that folder in. Just like before, we connect the dots, image to image, model to model and upscale image to save image. We select a directory to export the images. In the image name chainner again. Image extension we’ll select jpg, quality 100. Now, let’s hit play. Okay, it’s completed. Now, let’s get back to the folder and see how it turned out. See, just one image. Why did it turn out this way? Now let’s go back to the chainner app and find out. It was given only one output name for the images and as it had only one output name it could not create more than one images with the same name. Therefore all the images created replaced each other and ended in one final image. Now, how to correct that? Let’s go here ‘Overall index’ bring it to math. As you can see it just changed the number here from 0 to 7. the math operation I have put here is addition. It would add 1 to every next image. Let’s add 1. Let’s bring the result to text A. For the text B let’s just write ‘chainner’ again and now the output text would go to here to the image name.

Now let’s get back to the folder again, shall we? Here are the images. They are all upscaled right now. Now this image properties details here 4096×4096, 96 DPI. If you want something like 300 ppi or 600 ppi you can just go to a software and change it. There are lots of free software out there. Let me know in the comments which model you are using and if out of those models I like any one myself, I’ll try to make a tutorial on that or a review of that model.