AI Upscaling: The Resurgence of an Old Technique
In recent years, AI upscaling has been making a comeback. While the technique has been around for a while, new tricks of the trade have brought it back into the mainstream. AI upscaling is the process of taking an image, typically generated with AI, and applying some upscaling to it, which allows you to zoom in and get more detail out of your image. Essentially, it's taking your image and making it larger physically, with more pixels, so you can see more detail.
The Problem with Magnific AI
One AI upscaler that has been blowing up lately is Magnific AI. It does upscaling a little bit differently than other upscalers, creatively hallucinating more details as well as upscaling the image to a higher resolution. However, Magnific AI has a serious problem: it's not cheap. For what you get from Magnific, the pricing isn't even close to where it should be. Magnific AI wants a minimum price of $40 per month to only do 200 normal upscales and 100 large ones per month. That is ridiculous. Most AI image generation sites for $30 a month will give you infinite AI generation. The prices just get crazier from there, with $100 a month for only 550 normal upscales and 250 large ones. This is the best deal, and it's still $100 a month. I would almost never recommend anyone actually go out and purchase a Magnific plan.
Free Alternatives to Magnific AI
There are legitimately a lot of really awesome free alternatives to Magnific AI. For example, Korea AI currently has a completely free upscaler that's very similar to Magnific. It can take a very blurry photo and hallucinate a lot of that detail back while maintaining a lot of the composure of the original. However, this one does come with some caveats. Often times, it will not have the same high fidelity that you can get out of Magnific while you're trying to maintain the original image. Your upscales might either look like a horrendous mess or represent the original but not really be a great upscale as a whole. A lot of times, because it's free, everyone's trying to use this at once, so you'll just end up with some generations that entirely fail, and the upscaling does take forever.
The Solution: Upscale
There is a solution that sort of solves both of these problems, and it's entirely free and runs locally on your own machine at home. It's called Upscale, and it's a completely free and open-source AI upscaler that runs locally on your machine at home. It's fast and completely free, with very low wait times because it's running on your own hardware. If someone came to me who was new to AI image generation and was looking for the best way to start upscaling their AI-generated images with mid-journey Dolly 3, etc., this is exactly where I would point them.
How to Use Upscale
To use Upscale, you first select the image that you want to upscale, then select a model from the six solid models provided. Ultramix balanced is a great model to start with. Then, select an output folder, and press the upscale button. It will tell you the original resolution of your image and what it will get upscaled to. Depending on your graphics card, it's going to take different amounts of time, but you'll have an image in no time. The upscaling is pretty incredible, especially for being entirely open source, free, and running on your own machine at home.
When to Use Upscale
Upscale is great for vector-style images, such as comic book art styles or graphic art. It can do perfection essentially in this area. When it comes to photography, it really depends on how much detail and how good your original base photo is. The more detail, the better this is going to work. However, if you're trying to reimagine old video games or images into something that's a cartoon video game character to real life, this is not what it's able to do. This is more of a reimagining an image to image than an upscaling.
Conclusion
In conclusion, AI upscaling is making a comeback, and there are free alternatives to expensive upscalers like Magnific AI. Upscale is a great solution that is entirely free and runs locally on your own machine at home. It's fast, easy to use, and can produce incredible results. While it may not be able to do everything, it's a great tool to have in your arsenal for upscaling images.
