Increase Image Resolution - Is it always a solution?

Let's talk about when we should and shouldn't use Image Upscale when enhancing our images with AI.

Long story short, it's not always a good idea to upscale an image. Quite often the problem is not in the resolution, but in the image quality that simply doesn't reflect the number of pixels the image has. Let's get into more details about various options that do not necessarily force us to change resolution of pic.

The two images above has identical amount of detail in them, but one of them is 400x400 pixels, and the second one is 1500x1500 pixels. Many photos in our collections are unnecesarily big, with no details that could justify such a big resolution. That's why, if we now take the 400x400 image and use AI to upscale it to 1500x1500 - this image will actually look better, than the original 1500x1500 image.

Above we upscaled the smaller image and if we compare the two 1500x1500 pixels images we can see a stunning difference. It's because so often our resolution is not followed by quality. Many phones can now take photos in crazy resolutions like 24,000x24,000 pixels. But the details and image quality simply does not follow those numbers. Due to marketing demands, phone and cameras producers where engaging in an arms race, who will provide more megapixels. So they were just pumping the numbers balloon, and provided larger photos, without worrying about the lack of details. That philosophy resulted in giving us photos that are high in resolution but make image low quality.

How to enlarge a photo without losing quality?

Now that we understand why resolution does not equal quality, we can explore alternative ways to improve a photo, including upscaling, but not focusing only on it.

1. Reduce the image size before upscaling. This is something that demands your manual approach. You need to estimate if it's viable for a photo to reduce it's resolution without losing the details and how much you can reduce it. Afterwards, you can upscale photo with AI to its original size or bigger, and the result should be far better than the original photo.
2. Reduce noise on a photo. AI Enhancer PRO allows you to easily select just a "reduce noise" feature and enhance your image with it. The result will have the same resolution, but should take less physical space in kilobites due to smoother surfaces and less noise information needed. Noise reduction often make images look more professional, easier to view and the colors get a bit more vibrant (due to less noise).
3. Sharpen edges. Even without image upscaling you can easily sharpen the edges of the photo using the "sharpen" feature in AI Image Enhancer. It's great for smaller corrections, or getting rid of lens or motion blur. Please be aware that it will not fix an image that's completely out of focus.
4. Color correction. Color correction is sometimes all a good photo need to become a perfect photo. No need to overdo enhancements if we just need the colors to be more aligned to our vision. This is also one of the features already available in AI Enhancer PRO.
5. Light correction. AI Enhancer PRO allows you to bring back light to underlit areas in the photo. For example your model were posing in front of a light source. And you got a dark model with white wall behind. Deep Image can help with that. It can bring up the dark areas and tone down those overlit, or even burned white pixels.
6. Background removal or replacement. This is a case specific solution. But especially in eCommerce, you can achieve fantastic results by simply making an image transparent. The object without background will pop on the website and look more interesting.
7. Auto-Enhance. That's a no brainer. You just upload the photo, click "Auto-Enhance" and AI automatically analyses the photo, improves what needs to be improved. For example enhance faces on the photo, remove noise, deblur, correct colors and light. And all that with just one click. The resolution might also be upscaled but only for a very small photos.

How to pick the right Photo upscaler?

Due to various nature of images, there are specialized upscalers that thrive in their specific niches. It's great to use the right tool for the right job, as it is providing you best possible results. Although I am highly encouraging everyone to thoroughly testing all the available options, because every single case is a bit different and you might achieve exactly what you were looking for while using tools that were not specifically designed for it. AI Image Enhancement is still in the early phase, and even the model creators are not always aware of the full potential that they might provide.

Classic Photo Upscale - Best everyday upscaler for most purposes. It's accurate, doesn't halucinate, helps with photos, images, smaller and larger. It's the most basic tool from the family of Upscalers.

Generative Upscale - More creative brother of the classic Upscale. Able to reimagine lost details from a picture. It's great to achieve highly detailed photos. Also very good for upscaling AI Generated images, as it only adds value there. Not very good when you need exact details kept. Generative Upscaling is available in most of our tools as an option that you can turn on or off.

Document Upscale - although the name suggests it's for documents, it's mainly for photos with some text on it. For example a product photo of a shampoo bottle with text on the label. Document Upscale helps keep the text readable after an update.

Thank you for reading to the end. I have a little surprise for you. If you send me an email to support@deep-image.ai and send me the message with words "Halloween deal", I will give you 50 free credits in exchange. You need to make a free account on Deep Image, so I can have a place to add your credits. This little "promotion" is valid till the 5th of November 2024.