Just a tip I picked up from another KZfaq contributor: When upscaling an image, use a combination of different ai software choices (such as GP AI and PS), then layer them in PS, mask, and brush out the parts of the image that look better on the underlying layer. Love this channel, and keep the great videos coming.

This dude looks like he got upscaled by ai

As the IT manager of a small animation studio, your statement on being upfront with pricing is spot on. When assessing options I have to create a price matrix and present it to producers. I don't have the time to submit a form, talk to a sales, agent, and sign up for a demo just to get a price. Unless someone asked for that software specifically, I am going to pass on it and move onto the next alternative.

Very helpful video. For what it's worth, if anyone is specifically looking to upscale png images with transparency and sharp lines (illustrations), I have found BigJpg to be leagues ahead of the others. I had some tiny 256x256 Windows icons I wanted to upscale, and every single one except BigJpg produces garbage looking edges and/or weird halos, not being able to handle the transparency. Apparently bigjpg focuses on being an "anime" upscaler, so is probably trained much more on cartoon images. It actually does a good job. I haven't really tested it at all with regular images because I use Gigapixel for those. (And gigapixel also completely sucks at images with transparency)

I've tried few pictures with Imglarger and it is extremely impressive. It loses some roughness and makes things look slightly cartoony and too soft, but the sheer resolution upgrade is amazing. It brings back so much detail, even from pictures that are so pixalated that even you yourself cannot recreate in your mind. Though admittedly this works best for artwork and other images like that, the artifacts and detail loss/blend for real pictures or game screenshots, especially for signs, letters and etc is pretty substantial. Pricing is not very realistic, you cannot expect average user to pay monthly subscription for imagine upscaler, we just want to enhance few wallpapers and screenshots from time to time. As always pricing plans do not take such users into account

Plot twist: He didn't have this video idea at all but he did it just because he got so angry at gigapixel :D

I am a Gigapixel AI customer and have not had any issues with it. I cannot say I've used it often, but when I have its been excellent. This past Winter I used it to 'stretch' a fairly large panorama file to 300 DPI x 6 feet wide. I don't recall the original file size, so maybe it was like a 2x or 3x expansion. Anyway, the resulting print and image file came back with zero issues. All this said, there are settings for Gigapixel AI that need to be adjusted for optimal quality. CPU vs GPU, etc.

Let’s enhance just destroyed all the detail and made everything smooth. It’s by far the worst upscaler in the list.

Why didn’t you compare the winner to the full resolution image?

Bro! This is the most comprehensive and unbiased review I have seen. It opened my eyes to more things than you can imagine. Thanks for taking the time to create this video so we understand our choices and make the best decision when purchasing any of these products.

I love the way you drop little pieces of tech knowledge at the beginning of your videos. So quick and simple but makes so much sense and I never understood the concept before you explained it 😊

I have all 3 of the topaz image AI, and I’m very pleased with what they give me. Even though sometime it doesn’t work that well, but most of the time it works great

for me letsenhance is one of the worst, it kills details and artificial smoothing of textures, it's a no go

Disabling the GPU in Gigapixel will avoid horizontal banding in the result

Just a quick note that since this video has been released, Photoshop has come out with their own AI upscaling filter - the results hsve been excellent for me so far. Really great video, I appreciate the work you put into doing this comparison!

Excellent video, exactly what I wanted! You earned a subscription. Thank you 🙂 I do a lot of colorization and restoring of old images. I'd love to see a video on those please. I soften shoot in poor lighting, resulting in unnatural skin colors, any advice on that besides using white balance? Remini does a reasonably good job, but it's pricing is crazy.

Would have liked to see a comparison of the enhanced against the full res original to see how close they came if at all to true upscale.

Why are my eyes telling me Letsenhance is just a blurry mess but his eyes tell him there are details unseen to me?

Part of the issue with the demo of Topaz GAI is that in the demo he turned on face enhancement for that large, portrait only image. Topaz intends that setting to be used for small faces in a crowd (goodness only knows if they have a tool tip about that ....); it actually makes portraits worse if used in the way this demo is shown (by turning the face enhancement feature on for a headshot like was used to demo).

Thanks, I have never seen this kind of perfection ! Fast pace, easy to understand and just perfect way of making videos! Great quality too, top indeed. Keep going, subscribed!

Thank you so much! You have amazing tutorials, I find out so many useful things from you. I love how you're so passionate about what you do, that it's impossible not get interested in creating my own stuff :)

Kudos my friend. When you brought up Gigapixel I was like "damn this guy really about to throw advertisements under the table" hahah I was wrong!

Independent non pro here, I’ve loved luminar but it’s really the only one I have. It’s simple and I dig the results . I stay open to new stuff but I never know who’s on the payroll . This channel seems pretty good and I’m a fan

I would love for you to redo this in 2022. I think there are more software and the old software have advanced in performance. AlienSkin BlowUp would be nice to see compared too

Wow!! His teaching style is fantastic! Congratulations for your work. I'm speechless! Thank you!

I dont have money so we'll go for Four xD We are all on the same boat buddy xD

This is an old review of December 2019. Please provide an updated review on this, as Gigapixel AI has undergone a major update and does a fantastic job. Also it can be customised to a particular image very well. Another note: according to me the online app "Letsenhance" in the end was clearly ranked far too high with its loss of eyelashes of the example image. Other than that it is a good comparison and very useful video and some great suggestions what aspects to look at when judging the results.

I can’t even begin to describe how helpful this is

Need to compare with original photo.

This video, your tutorials, and your entire channel are so. insanely. valuable. Thank you so much, Unmesh.

Dude great video. I think you should regularly continue this annually or every 6 months according to the new products at market. And a humble tip, at the end of the video, pick the most important a few details such as, eyes, hairs, etc. then create a table for the most promising 3 software as a final comparison. But anyway, good work brother, keep it up.

I use ML upscale on Pixelmator Pro on an M1 iMac. It’s superb, and uses the M1 16 ML hardware cores to render upscales. On intel this takes 55 seconds, on M1 it takes 2 seconds.

3:33 THAT LOVELY MECH KEYBOARD SOUND

How come you missed Genuine Fractals or ON1 stuff which has been an age old plugin for PS. Deliberate or not worth it?

When i need to learn something and i find out theres a tutorial of yours, man, i get happy! haha You are awesome!

Very useful comparison. Thank you. For faces alone I'm sticking with Remini on my iPhone. Sure it doesn't do other parts of the image but it's free for 5 images a day and there's no size limitation.

Even if I wasn't studying digital media I'd listen to this man talk for hours

Letsenhance should've been disqualified for removing eye lashes and detail🤨 Softness never looks good, unless you're a japanese pop star...

Thanks for the comparision but I won't judge based on one sample photos. Different software may have different algorithms and may perform better in different cases.

Great presentation! Fast; to the point; informative; and no bs introduction - you immediately jumped in knowing we all need it fast. Good karma to you, my friend!

And I literally just bought Gigapixel yesterday! TBO, I didn't notice any horizontal artifacts, and the results are quite impressive compared to Photoshop.

Ranking Best to worst: 1.ImgLarger 2. Letsenhance 3. ImageUpscaler 4.Photoshop 5. DeepimageAI 6. BigJPG 7.Gigapixel

For anyone wondering, Deep Image AI also costs money now and sadly isn't fully free anymore. They've also got a 5 image limit that you get when signing up for an account. My guess is that they somehow saw *this* video and thought ''You know what, let's just make it cost money like all the other similar pages''.

this guy is very good in photoshop skill, the way he made the details explanation with simple words is outstanding. The way you talked, I know you are good in front of audience too. Salute your teaching skills

Gigapixel's did have some artifact issues for a short time, the latest version rocks.

With Gigapixel I have noticed a difference between CPU and GPU rendering. Also that artifact is more than likely caused by the face enhancement feature, which seems to be a new feature.

I tried Remini app free and it did some amazing jobs on some of my old family photos. I use it a lot now for old portraits and results are simply stunning... Watching this video, I could not achieve this with the two top sites listed in here imglarger and letsenhance!

I am so glad you made this comparison because I was about to add Topaz Lab's Gigapixel AI to my collection of software purchases from them. I have found those lines showing up in many of their processing and have been disappointed. There are a lot of items in Topaz Labs I do love, but most of the time I find myself going to several of their plugins to fix something from the previous plugin image result. I don't like how they constantly come out with "new and better" to where you are constantly purchasing (they should be offering more updates instead). But anyway, I do use them a lot and work with what I have. In conclusion, after watching your comparison, I decided not to spend the $79. Thank you!

Awesome tutorial as always :) You are next level guy 😊

Great video, I agree with the ranking, except for LetsEnhance, I would put it in the last position. Leaves the image very washed.

Great video, super insightful and easy to follow. It would be really nice to see an updated version of this video with so many new tools available out there (AI-powered as well).

I was really surprised to see Gigapixel get such a low score; I’ve seen it used for a fair few upscaling mods for games with prerendered backgrounds, and naturally assumed it was the best. Thanks for setting me straight there!

12:05 Well, I enjoyed the video so much that I Liked it twice! ;)

Can you do one on monitor calibration or something like that so photo look same on monitor , mobile, print . Thanks in advance

I personally use the one from Zyro, since it tends to be fairly good quality and is completely free to use for as many images as you would like.

thank you for the detailed compair. Very handful! love it!

The whole point of having Gigapixel as an actual software on your PC is so that you can fine tune the settings before conversion. With a live preview of the end result. Not using this leads to sub par results. What were you expecting?

Gigapixel was amazing in the little preview window but left artifacts after full processing. However, judging from your results, I think I'd have just put Gigapixel at the top and called the artifacts a cost of upscaling. Then photoshop them out.

this video is actually very informative. thanks for sorting everything out!

Dude, I love your videos. They are very informative. Thanks for making all these available for free.

He: "LetsEnhance is clearly better", me: Leaving....

20:04 how something that removes so much detail can be better than something that preserves the details ???? paid video?

Great video, for amateur modding for video games this has been really helpful. Thanks a lot

Thank you for all of your work! I always appreciate it.

Hi, I use gigapixel a lot. It is weird, I never seen those lines like that. Please let us download that test image so we can compare

This is an interesting test and comparision. Thank you. But my learnings are total different. This demo is about a portrait/face close up. If you choose "normal" photos with people anywere in the picture all AI image upscaler has the same problem: face gets destroyed. Also your prefered IMGLAGER with ranking 1 damage in nearly each case the faces; same as e.g. with Topaz Gigapixel. I don't know why the providers don't attend/react on this common problem since years. The solutions are long time on the market, but there are no improvements/updates in order to deal with faces. What features are missing in each AI photo and video enhancement tool are manual adjustment sliders for sharpness, deblocking, denoising and get rid of artifacts. In order to prevent face damage it need a mask tool with manual adjustment slider. Today the AI enhancement tools for photos and videos are only usable for landscape footage without any people in the picture. I don't see any sign from software providers to improve their software and get rid of face damage problems.

You're so awesome! Thank you for all the content you put out there, it's always what I'm looking for!

Thanks for sharing! I've been using Nero Image Upscaler and I found it useful too! And most important of all, it's free!

For some reason, Gigapixel AI seems to have a problem with outputting JPG images, so to remove those weird artifacts, try to enable "Convert File Format" and choose PNG. the result will be much better (better than ImgLarger in my experience).

In my opinion you have not done justice to Gigapixel. First of all, sadly, Topaz sometimes produces updates without properly conducting the beta testing and horrible stuff like the horizontal lines. This is inexcusable. However, I have get excellent results with Gigapixel. I never got the horizontal lines, as far as I can remember, and I have used Gigapixel since the very first version. Your choice of settings was not ideal. First, you should never choose the Faces option, unless the faces are really very, very small in the photo. Second, I never just use the Auto Settings, but instead always test each image (or one or two samples in a whole image series) and adjust the noise and sharpening parameters. So, my suggestion to you is get the free update to your version, and follow my suggestions. In any case I found the comparison fascinating, I've never heard of most of these web based upscaling services that are mostly free. I always enjoy all of your tutorials and am very grateful for the SUPERB job that you do with each and every one. Thanks a million, Dan

Your videos are just perfect. Information, presentation, video quality, sound, lighting, background, and even your cool t-shirt :)

Really useful video in my opinion. I've used Gigapixel for years but if you try and upscale too much then it tends to create a slightly strange effect.

I don't get why letsenhance got the 2nd place.

@PiXimperfect Any chance of an update with the newer version of Gigapixel?

Very thorough and well done comparison. Thanks for the excellent video!

Dear Unmesh, You help me every single time. Thanks a million - Pete

I was expecting him to compare the up-scaled to the original image.:'(

Gigapixel is evolving very much, Latest version makes absolute magic with some photos!

Brilliant work! Thanks for handling the test for me, I had been wondering about buying Gigapixel AI. Very well explained.

Thanks for this! I am an editorial designer and i've slept through the advances in img upscaling. I used details 2.0 in all those years. I just tested with a REALY BAD image and *jeez*, ImgLarger is so much better than details2.0 !!

Who agrees to me that he overrated that "LetsEnhance"??? I think he should have put it in the bottom just like he did with Gigapixel, I don't think that crap deserves te 2nd place...

Interesting video. I've tried almost all of these 'ai' upscalers myself before, but what I noticed is that the end results vary from platform to platform depending on the specifics of the photo you are upscaling. What you upscaled was a VERY clean, decently high resolution image.. and thus I feel it doesn't really showcase the quality of the 'image improvement' of each specific platform. I've tried super noisy, artefact ridden small resolution poorly exposed images and there the differences between these platforms really springs out. Would love to see another video but then with an actually challenging photo. :)

i paused the video at 3:22 going to the link then trying it, yeah its cool! my original photo was 1152 x 694 get upscaled and increased detail to 4608 x 2776 THANKS BRO! it worked like a charm

Absoluetly stunning, never thinked about this process THAT way. Thank you for sharing!

You are too much lovely, you paid for us. We, specially me, I'm very much thankful.❤ But, don't be worry. We'll always be here beside you. Have great days!❤

15:22 I watched 3 20 second non-skipable ads bro

i rly liked the way u present. very clear and understanding and at the same time very interesting too. so I am subscribing

Thanks Unmesh, appreciate your time and effort. You've set it straight, i use a few of these products in my photos.

Can you upload the low-res picture to anywhere letting me test it in Alien Skin Blow-UP PS Plugion?

You really need to retry Gigapixel AI, I have never gotten the Lines and it is definitely better than any of the others. They do have updates all the time though. It could also have been your starting image. Try a different photo.

Thank you so much for these tests.

That's really helps me alot on the long run and some distorted photos

"These are my personal opinion and preferences and yours might be different and it's absolutrly fine because thats what makes all of us unique." I lloved this line and I am going to use it at the end of every arguement ;)

I’d like to also recommend Waifu2x. It’s been around for awhile. Free and great for artwork.

i have benefited a lot from watching your videos. have been using imagelarger since you posted this video

This video solved my problem..I was super confused and now I know which one to go for! Thanks a lot! You are awesome!

You're right, these rankings are definitely dependent on the eye of the viewer. LetsEnhance was disqualified for me because it overly softened the image to the point of throwing away important details. Was it ugly? Not exactly... but it certainly wasn't accurate enough for my tastes. I don't understand why you bothered importing the original or the low-res version if you weren't going to do a final comparison of the "winner" with them both. Might as well not even have had them loaded in.

In some jpg, Gigapixel AI has still “red stripes bug” when “Use maximum Quality AI Models” and GPU Acceleration is enabled.

WOW thank you so much for these comparisons, best explanation of photo enhancers period, and you even put out of pocket for it bravo! 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This video is great. I was looking for a good image upscale and you have broken it down for me. Cool beans and thanks for your wonderful videos.