Enlarge images without loss of quality free of charge using AI

Do you know how annoying it can be when you want to enlarge an image and all you end up with is pixel muck? I mean, until a few years ago, all the tools just weren't really capable of doing that, and yes, I explicitly mean Photoshop too! The good news is that we live in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), and it's making our lives easier in many ways. Today I'm going to show you how you can upscale images without losing quality. And the best thing is: many tools are even free or allow you to upscale a few images per day for free !

AI-controlled image scaling: How does it actually do it?

If you've ever tried to double or triple the size of an image, you'll know how quickly it can go wrong. Suddenly the edges are blurred, colors are washed out, and everything just looks muddy. This is particularly annoying if you need an image for a project and don't have a higher-resolution version to hand.

Good old interpolation

Interpolation methods are often used in classic image editing. Put simply, the program tries to "guess" the missing pixels between the existing ones. This usually works so-so because the software simply doesn't have enough context to really know what the missing piece should look like.

AI is like a good friend who knows you really well

AI-driven image scaling goes one step further. Instead of just guessing, it analyzes the context of the entire image. The AI models have been trained beforehand with thousands or even millions of images so that they can recognize patterns, shapes and textures really well. It's like giving a good friend an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Because they know you and your tastes, they are much better at guessing which piece belongs where.

The magic of deep learning

Now we come to the really cool stuff: deep learning. These are AI models with multiple layers that each analyze certain aspects of the image. For example, one layer might focus on edges and lines, another on color gradients and a third on textures. This multi-layered analysis allows the AI to generate a much more detailed and accurate image.

Generative models

Some advanced AI tools even use generative models. These are AI models that not only analyze, but can also "create" themselves. Imagine you have a picture of a cat, but the tail is missing. A generative model could even invent the missing tail so that it matches the rest of the image.

In a nutshell

The AI takes your image and breaks it down into its individual parts, analyzes patterns and context and then adds the missing pixels so that they fit into the overall image. The result is an upscaled image that is often so good it's hard to believe it wasn't always this high resolution.

First of all, I would like to present a large table with all the tools that I have actually tested in detail. After the table, I would like to present all the tools in detail so that you can get a taste of where the strengths and weaknesses of the tools really lie.

Here we go!

Upscayl - The insider tip among the free image scaling tools

Upscayl is a free and open source AI image upscaler. With Upscayl, you can enlarge and enhance low-resolution images using advanced AI algorithms. Enlarge your images without losing quality.

Upscayl is a cross-platform application developed according to the Linux-first philosophy. This means that Linux users receive pre-release versions earlier, but Upscayl itself is available on all major desktop operating systems. I am also enthusiastic about all the updates that are released almost monthly. There is currently even an idea that Upscayl should run in the cloud, so that you don't have to worry so much about having a good graphics card if you don't want to wait long for the finished images. I also like the fact that several models can be selected for scaling and that everything can also be run in batch mode (i.e. entire folders with thousands of images can be converted quickly).

Topaz Photo AI - test winner for paid image enlargement programs

Topaz PhotoAI is a software for improving image quality with artificial intelligence (AI). It was developed by Topaz Labs and is available for Windows and macOS.

The software offers a range of features to enhance photos, including

• Remove Noise: reduces noise in photos taken in low light conditions.
• Upscaling: Increases the resolution of photos without losing quality.
• Sharpen: Improves the sharpness of photos.
• Adjust Lighting & Balance Color: Corrects the colors/lighting of photos.

Topaz Photo AI uses AI to perform these functions. This means that the software learns what realistic images look like and then uses this information to improve the quality of your photos. The software is really very easy to use. You can simply import a photo and select the functions you want. Topaz Photo AI does the rest. It's ideal for photographers and designers who want to take their photos to the next level.

Costs and availability

Topaz Photo AI regularly costs $199, but is available every few months as a discount promotion for around $159. You then automatically get 1 year of free updates (even if there are big version jumps coming up) and can use the software on 2 computers at the same time. A free trial version is available. I bought the program myself because the results are simply fantastic and it fixes several problems at once. There is also a batch mode so that I can correct and save as many images as I want in one go. Definitely try it out!

Topaz Gigapixel AI - Enlarge images with very good results

Topaz GigapixelAI is a software for improving image quality with artificial intelligence (AI). It was developed by Topaz Labs and is available for Windows and macOS.

The software is primarily designed to increase the resolution of photos . With Gigapixel AI, you can increase the resolution of a photo by up to 600% without losing quality.

The software uses AI to reconstruct the missing details in an image. To do this, the software trains a neural network with a huge database of photos. The neural network learns what realistic images look like and uses this information to fill in the missing details in an image.

Topaz Gigapixel AI can also be used for other purposes to improve the quality of photos, e.g:

• Noise reduction: Reduces noise in photos taken in low light conditions.
• Sharpening: Improves the sharpness of photos.
• Color correction: Corrects the colors of photos.
• Restoration: Repairs damaged or blurred photos.

What surprised me particularly positively: I was able to remove a very old scanned photo, which had a visible halftone effect, very well thanks to the software.

Costs and availability

Topaz Gigapixel AI costs 99 USD per year. A free trial version is available.

Reviews

Topaz Gigapixel AI has been praised by critics and users alike. The software was rated 4.5 out of 5 stars on Capterra.

Conclusion

Topaz Gigapixel AI is a great way to improve the quality of your photos. The software is powerful, easy to use and offers a range of features that can take your photos to the next level.

Benefits of Topaz Gigapixel AI:

• Can increase the resolution of photos by up to 600% without losing quality.
• Can also be used for other purposes to improve the quality of photos, such as noise reduction, sharpening and color correction.
• Easy to use.
• Powerful software that can take the quality of your photos to a new level.

VANCE AI Upscale Image

VanceAI Image Upscaler helps to enlarge images up to 8x online and even up to 40x in the software. Additional scales from 2x, 4x, 8x to 40x and AI models are available to upscale anime, text images, art and more without loss of quality or detail. Free previews are available so you can enjoy AI upscaling! Try it online or download the software for Windows or Mac (coming soon) via "Free Download" to enlarge images! Similar to Topaz Photo AI, this program (which even works additionally via website) can not only upscale images, but also denoise or sharpen them.

When I first came into contact with this software, I thought, well, that's not going to work. But far from it! The software is better than you might think. Just give it a try! You also get a few credits for free when you register for the first time, so you can export everything without a watermark.

Adobe Photoshop - The top dog ... but not the king of the lions

Photoshop is an image editing program from Adobe that has been on the market since 1988. It is one of the most popular and powerful image editing programs in the world and is used by professionals and amateurs alike.

Photoshop allows users to scale images in a variety of ways, including

• Manual scaling: with manual scaling, users specify the new width and height of the image in pixels. This can lead to a loss of quality if the image is greatly enlarged.
• Keep current resolution: With this method, the size of the image is changed without changing the resolution. This can lead to a blurred image if the image is greatly enlarged.
• Change resolution: This method changes the size of the image and adjusts the resolution. This can result in a sharper image, but it requires more memory.

Since version 2023, Photoshop also offers the option of scaling images using AI. This function is called "Super Zoom" and uses machine learning to maintain the quality of the image when scaling. You can find the filter under: Menu -> Filters -> Neural Filters -> Super Zoom

Overall, however, I have to say that I don't particularly like the quality of the scaling. Other programs are much better. But Adobe is making a lot of headway with AI ... so maybe it's just a matter of time!

Nero Image Upscaler--Free Photo Enlarger & Cartoon Enhancer Online

Nero Image Upscaler is one of several products from Nero. Nero AI offers a suite of AI-driven tools that focus on photo editing and management. The main features include:

• Image Upscaler: Enlarges photos without losing quality.
• Photo Tagger: Organizes photos in your library by categorizing them.
• Nero Muse: Turns text into art.
• Face Animation: Creates animated photos.
• Photo Restoration: Restores old or damaged photos.
• There's also a PC benchmark called Nero Score, which measures the performance of your CPU and GPU. The AI functions are especially optimized for 12th generation Intel Core processors. And the folks at Nero are pretty bullish on AI; they see it as the future and are investing heavily in it.

I was even able to upscale images for free without registration and download them without watermarks. Very nice :-) And there are always great discount promotions for downloading the software.

Runway - lots of AI models under one roof

Runway is a cloud-based image editing platform that offers a range of features, including image scaling. With Runway AI, you can scale images by any size in a matter of minutes without having to worry about quality.

Runway AI uses an AI-based approach to scaling images that ensures high quality while processing quickly. Runway's AI algorithms can recognize the details of an image and preserve them when scaling the image. The platform also offers many other useful AI tools (especially for videos). Just take a look.

Real-ESRGAN Inference - simply enlarge images

Real-ESRGAN (in the link you can run it directly on Google) is a generative adversarial network (GAN) developed for image and video restoration. It can be used to improve the quality of images and videos that are degraded by compression, noise or other artifacts.

The inference of Real-ESRGAN takes place in three steps:

1. Pre-processing: the input image is converted into a format that can be processed by Real-ESRGAN.
2. Inference: The network is fed with the pre-processed image and generates a high-resolution image.
3. Post-processing: The high-resolution image can optionally be further processed to improve the quality.

Pre-processing

The input image is converted into a format that can be processed by Real-ESRGAN. This can be an RGB image with a resolution of 256 x 256 pixels or a YCbCr image with a resolution of 512 x 512 pixels. The image is then converted into a grayscale tensor.

Inference

The network is fed with the pre-processed image and generates a high-resolution image. The network is divided into two parts: a generator and a discriminator. The generator produces the high-resolution image, while the discriminator tries to distinguish between the high-resolution image and a real image.

Post-processing

The high-resolution image can optionally be further processed to improve the quality. This can include the application of an anti-aliasing filter or the correction of color distortions.

Real-ESRGAN inference methods

There are three ways to infer Real-ESRGAN:

• Online inference: Real-ESRGAN is available online via a REST API. This method is easy to use, but requires an internet connection.
• Portable executable files (NCNN): Real-ESRGAN is available as an NCNN portable executable file. These files can be run on a computer or mobile device.
• Python script: Real-ESRGAN is available as a Python script. This method offers the most flexibility, but requires some knowledge of Python.

Advantages of Real-ESRGAN

Real-ESRGAN offers a number of advantages over other image and video restoration techniques:

• It can achieve high image quality.
• It is robust against various types of artifacts.
• It is fast and efficient.

Disadvantages of Real-ESRGAN

Real-ESRGAN also has some disadvantages:

• It requires a large amount of computing power.
• It can lead to artifacts if not configured properly.

Can also be downloaded directly here as a Windows application: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN#portable-executable-files-ncnn (can only be run in the command prompt) and handy batch file here: https://github.com/gmazy/Real-ESRGAN-Drag-Drop/blob/main/drag%26drop-here.bat (then you can simply drag & drop your image file onto the batch file and get your image a few seconds later). By the way, Real-ESRGAN is often used by many open source scaling tools. I have explained how this all works in detail in my video training Enlarging images and photos without loss of quality with Photoshop and AI .

ChaiNNER

ChaiNNER is an open source software library for machine learning development. It offers a range of features that facilitate the development of neural networks, including a simple and intuitive API, efficient implementation and support for different types of neural networks.

ChaiNNer can be used to scale images by training a neural network that projects the pixel values of an image to a higher or lower resolution. The network is trained with a training dataset of scaled images, and then it can be used to scale new images.

Training:

Training a neural network to scale images is done with the chainer function chainer.functions.resize(). This function takes an image as input and generates a scaled image as output.

The training data set should consist of a balanced ratio of scaled images with different sizes. The images should be saved in a format that is supported by Chainer, such as PNG or JPEG.

Inference:

The inference of a neural network for scaling images is done with the Chainer function chainer.functions.resize(). This function takes an image as input and generates a scaled image as output.

The scaling can be done by any factor, e.g. to enlarge the image by 2 or reduce it by 0.5.

Advantages:

Scaling images with Chainer offers a number of advantages, including:

• High quality: ChaiNNer can be used to scale images with high quality.
• Efficiency: ChaiNNer is efficiently implemented to speed up the scaling of images.
• Flexibility: ChaiNNer can be used to scale images to any resolution.

Disadvantages:

Scaling images with Chainer also has some disadvantages, including:

• Training data: training a neural network to scale images requires a large amount of training data.
• Computing power: Scaling images with Chainer can be computationally intensive and you have to download the appropriate model first (I have explained how this all works in detail in my video training Enlarging images and photos without loss of quality with Photoshop and AI ).

At first, the program is pretty heavy for beginners. However, once you've played around with it a bit, it works. But what irritated me was the fact that it was the slowest program of all when scaling photos (if I wanted more than just double the resolution; at 8x magnification I stopped after 20 minutes because that's definitely too long ... okay, maybe I'll have to buy an even better graphics card one day). But since the program is constantly being further developed, you might as well take a look at it.

unlimited:waifu 2x

With unlimited:waifu2x you can scale your image super fast. Please don't be put off by the mega ugly website. The results are surprisingly good!

Unlimited Waifu2x is a web-based version of Waifu2x that runs on the user's computer without uploading the images to a remote server. It has the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

• No size limit for images (only the web browser's memory limit)
• Supports new art models, including 4x models
• Supports Tim (TTA stands for Test-Time Augmentation, a technique that can be used to improve the performance of machine learning).

Disadvantages:

• It is very slow, like a 90s modem internet access
• A modern web browser with support for WebAssembly is required

Processing performance could be improved if WebGPU is available.

Overall, Unlimited Waifu2x is a promising new tool for upscaling images in the browser. It is still in development, but has the potential to be a valuable resource for artists and anime fans.

Let's Enhance

Let'sEnhance is a free online platform that allows users to upscale images without losing quality. The platform uses artificial intelligence to generate new pixels that resemble the existing pixels. This allows images to be created with a significantly higher resolution than with conventional photo enlargement methods.

Functions

• Enlarges images up to 1000
• Preserves or restores lost details
• Offers a variety of options to customize the results
• Easy to use

Benefits

• 10 images free after registration ... but about $9 a month after that
• Allows you to enlarge images without losing quality
• Offers a variety of options to customize results
• Easy to use

Cons

• Cannot enlarge all types of photos equally well
• Can only download the result ... no before/after view possible

I thought the results were good. Definitely worth a test.

AI Image Upscaler

Img Upscaler is an online platform that allows users to upscale images without losing quality. The platform uses artificial intelligence to generate new pixels that resemble the existing pixels. As a result, images can be created with a significantly higher resolution than with conventional photo enlargement methods.

The results can be viewed immediately as a before/after image and in the free version you can have 20 images scaled per month (although only up to 2000x2000). In any case, I am satisfied with the results.

AI. Image Enlarger

AI. Image Enlarger is a website that uses AI technology to enhance and enlarge images. The website offers a range of features including:

• Image enlargement: images can be enlarged up to 8K without losing quality.
• Image sharpening: Blurred parts of images can be sharpened.
• Noise reduction: Noise and artifacts can be reduced.
• Image retouching: Faces and other objects can be retouched.
• Image background removal: Image backgrounds can be removed.
• Upscale anime images: Anime images can be upscaled without becoming pixelated.

Imglarger.com supports the most common image formats, including JPG and PNG. To enhance an image, users must upload it to the site and select the desired settings. The enhanced image can then be downloaded without a watermark.

The site is free to use (10 credits free after registration), but there is also a paid version that provides access to additional features, such as unlimited image uploads and higher resolution for image enlargement.

Imglarger.com is a useful tool for users who want to enhance their images. The site offers a number of features that allow users to sharpen their images, reduce noise and even enlarge them without losing quality. I think the results are all good, but not exceptional either.

ON1 Resize AI

ON1Resize AI is a photo enlargement software based on artificial intelligence (AI). It enables photographers to enlarge photos by up to 700% or more without losing essential details.

ON1 Resize AI uses a machine learning model trained on a huge dataset of photos. The model learns what natural and artificial textures look like in the world. When a photo is enlarged, the model uses this information to generate new pixels that resemble the existing pixels.

This allows photos to be created at a much higher resolution than traditional photo enlargement methods. The results are often amazing and offer a significant improvement over enlarged photos created using traditional methods.

Functions

• Enlarges photos up to 700% or more
• Preserves or restores lost details
• Offers a variety of options to customize results
• Easy to use

Benefits

• Allows you to enlarge photos without losing quality
• Provides a variety of options to customize results
• Easy to use

Disadvantages

• Is relatively expensive
• Can't scale all types of photos equally well

I'm reasonably happy with the results overall, but I feel other tools do a better job of scaling.

Conclusion

This article has introduced AI-driven image scaling. This technology makes it possible to enlarge images without any loss of quality. This was not possible a few years ago, as conventional interpolation methods resulted in blurred and washed-out images.

A number of AI-based image scaling tools were presented in the article, including both free and paid tools. The free software Upscayl was rated as the best free tool and Topaz Photo AI as the best paid tool .

Conclusion for free tools

The free Upscayl software offers a number of advantages:

• It is free and open source.
• It is cross-platform and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
• It offers a range of setting options to optimize the results.
• It can be used in batch mode to convert entire folders of images.

Disadvantages:

• The results are not always perfect.
• The software requires a good graphics card to process the AI algorithms.

Conclusion for paid tools

The paid software Topaz Photo AI offers a number of advantages:

• The results are generally better than with free tools.
• The software offers a wide range of functions to improve image quality.
• The software is easy to use.

Disadvantages:

• The software requires a fee and is also quite expensive ($199).

Outlook

AI-driven image scaling is a promising technology that will be further improved in the future. In the future, we will probably be able to enlarge images with even higher resolution and even better quality.