Trying Image Upscalers & Enhancers

Most image upscalers/enhancers I’ve found aren’t great for with fine details. Image upscalers/enhancers won’t do all the work if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I was trying to upscale and enhance a photo for a billboard. The client didn’t have a better one, and to get a new one there would be a bureaucracy involved.

The last time I had tried upscalers was ~2 years ago, and figured they’re really advanced and surely it’ll solve my problem.

But they didn’t. Now it seems there’s a ton of upscalers, because they’re easy to implement, and you need to find the right one for the job. In my case, there were some blurred elements on the margins, and I didn’t know I wanted them sharpened/enhanced in some way.

The most sensible one is from TopazLabs. For my case they seemed like the most focused and intuitive upscaler, with some control, that doesn’t degrade the quality of your image.

I haven’t tried all of them. Some notes:

• Canva seems to have some sort of app marketplace, and you can try out those apps and see which fits. This felt more time consuming than helpful.
• I would’ve loved to try Freepik.com’s offering, but they don’t have a free trial for upscaling.
• iloveimg.com made a reasonable effort.
• Picwish.com did a reasonable job because it made the parts that were bothering me sharper, which lead me to better understand what I needed to edit.
• I thought Replicate would be the best, since you get lots of state of the art models and pay based on how much you used each of them, based on their specific pricing. The models I had high hopes for returned an error after waiting 1-2 minutes, so I decided to give up.