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Tom's Guide
How to use AI to upscale your images for free
By David Crookes,
22 hours ago
Learning how to use AI to upscale your images for free can turn those annoying low-res images into a high-res masterpiece — to some degree, anyway. While Upscayl (the app we’ve used for this task) does require a little bit of fiddling around with the different models, you should at least be able to convert your images into something more pleasing on the eye.
Upscayl is a work-in-progress but it’s updated regularly and there’s lots of documentation available on its GitHub site. You will need to download it to your computer, though — a cloud version is on the way, but currently this AI image upscaler has to be used offline. That’s no biggie, assuming you have the drive space but be aware the resulting images can be large.
One thing’s for sure: Upscayl is easy-to-use and its feature set continues to grow making it an app to keep an eye on. So download it for MacOS, Linux and Windows via its website or via the developer’s GitHub . We've found the very latest versions are placed on GitHub.
If you turn on Batch Upscale, you will be able to select multiple images. Keeping it off means you will be upscaling individual images, one at a time.
To get started, either click Select Image and choose a PNG, JPG, JPED or WEBP image you want to upscale from your computer’s drive or drag your image to the window.
If you want to upload more than one image, you should turn on Batch Upscale – this will allow you to click Select Folder instead.
With your image(s) uploaded, you can click the button beneath Select Model . There are six different models to choose from, and we’d advise experimenting with each one. They range from real to ultra sharp and digital art.
There are two options available to you if you’re uploading individual images. The first is the ability to click “double Upscayl” which gets AI to upscale the image twice but be aware this can put pressure on your computer’s processor.
The second option is the ability to move the Image Scale slider to determine how large a resolution you want your resulting image to be but be aware that anything over 4X (except 16X Double Upscayl) will only resize the image. It won’t use AI upscaling.
If you are batch uploading, you can only make use of the slider.
When you are ready, double-check the extent to which the resolution will change and click Upscayl to allow the app to work its magic. The process can take a little while.
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