r/upscaling

Trying to upscale some old (1800's documents), what is the best upscaler for such a thing?

Hi everyone,

>

Hello guys,

I have trouble enhancing my security video. The video was made with a simple OEM wifi camera at night. The original video was lost, i only have a telephone screen recording i made for safety reasons.

There is a certain part of the video where the region of interest is in the edge of the pic and the camera went out of focus. This object is probably a police baton, but have to be sure about it. With small and fast movements.
I want to enhance, sharph that part.
Tried multiple things to achive it:
\- different ai-s of topaz, frame interpolation, noise deduction. Topaz video and topaz photo as well for the extracted frames. Tried every available AI tool.
\- capcut adjustments and ai help
\- tried making image sequence from the “important” part of video and enhancing the pictures.
\- tried addig diffenet type of point spread functions to try to reduce blurring and movement blurs. (made around 50 different types, different size with different movement direction)
\- used fiji enhancement from contrast changing to DevonvolveLab2 with Richardson-Lucy format.
\- tried z-stack with fiji, but there is not a single frame where the interested object is clear.
\- tried enhancing with a quality enhance program using opencv and pythorc (called Restormer).

Tried using the above technologies one by one, later as a sequence, one after another. But nothing achived the desired quality, not even close. The interested part still remains blurred and out of focus, most of the cases it became smudgy like a painting.

What are your opinions about this? which technology should work 100%, and maybe i made a mistake with the settings, or the preprocessing.
Any suggestion how to proceed?

Thank you in advance!

I paid to upscale one of my photos on Upscale.media. The output contained a large horizontal stripe across the image, making it completely unusable. This was clearly a processing error, not an issue with the original photo.

I contacted customer support and simply asked them to either reprocess the image or refund the credits that had been charged. Instead of resolving the problem, they repeatedly delayed the process with unhelpful responses and never provided a real solution. Most likely, they don't have human support; only a chatbot is available.

The defective result was never corrected, and I did not receive a refund.

My takeaway is simple: if their service fails, don't expect them to take responsibility or make things right. Customer support was disappointing, and I was left paying for a failed service.

Based on my experience, I cannot recommend Upscale.media. If you're considering using it, be aware that you may be on your own if something goes wrong.

Question to anyone with a brain. So I have the entire Persona 4 Animation with the English dub and I wanted to upscale the video for it since it’s on my PlayStation Portable and it looks like total ASS on a modern television. Would anyone know some good PC or Mac apps to upscale the videos? I have both a super powerful gaming PC and a 2019 Mac Pro that I think can do the job. If anyone has any recommendations let me know!

I spent months rebuilding my old Mac image resizer. On-device AI, 54 presets, $9.99 once, no telemetry.

Hey r/macapps!

Five years ago I shipped a rough little Electron image resizer to the Mac App Store. I just finished rebuilding it from the ground up for 2026 and relaunched it as Frostbatch.

Dark theme

What it does:

- Batch resize / compress / convert — JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF (reads HEIC, GIF, SVG too)

- On-device AI upscaling — Real-ESRGAN 2x/3x/4x on your GPU via Metal. Photo + Anime models bundled. Nothing is uploaded.

- 54 platform presets — Retina u/2x, OG image, favicon, Amazon/eBay/Etsy, Instagram/WordPress, print at 300 DPI, and more. One tap configures everything.

https://preview.redd.it/kffsw83k4i9h1.png?width=2554&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9959cd9d5cfa5218e474f823f36915d9cae58e0

- Watch folders — drop a file in, it's processed automatically.

- Strip EXIF/GPS/camera metadata before sharing.

- One-click archive export.

dark theme with files

On privacy: all processing is local. No analytics, no telemetry, no network calls beyond the update check. The App Store privacy label is literally "Data Not Collected."

Pricing: 10-days free trial with full features, then $9.99 one-time to unlock. No subscription, no AI credits, no nag screens.

Apple silicon native, macOS 13+.

I've got a handful of promo codes for anyone who wants the paid unlock in exchange for honest feedback — comment and I'll DM you one. I genuinely want to know what's missing or broken.

Link to app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/frostbatch-batch-image-resizer/id6765866345?mt=12

I was editing a 3 minute video on Davinci and lost all my original footage due to hardware complications, but luckily I had made proxy medias videos of all my footage. Now I'm stuck with low quality proxy video and searching for ways to enhance it's quality. I'm afraid to use AI and the video turns to have that waxy un natural look...

Any tips? I'm losing my mind over this, any help will be a life saver!

I want to upscale an image so that it'll look better as a poster, and was just wondering if theres a specific upscaler I should use for digital art? One of the depicted characters has freckles and when I upscale the image they turn into random smudges on her face, and ive tried multiple models and websites and they all gave me the same result, so maybe im just picking the wrong models? If theres any upscaler yall recommend for anime/comics/line art please tell me :3

(edit: forgot to mention this but it has to be free to use and go to at least 4x)

I'm trying to resize an image in Canva to use for a cardboard cutout. The original size of the image is 1400x 1389 and I need it to be higher resolution for the company to use it and not have it be super pixelated. Anytime I try to adjust it in canva, however, it just makes it a second page and then when I download it, it's still the same resolution. I'm new to Canva so maybe I'm just doing something wrong but any help would be appreciated! Would prefer not to use AI if possible

I have been looking for an affordable yet capable AI upscaler for my home media library. After spending several days testing a number of available solutions, I eventually narrowed my shortlist down to three products: Unifab Upscaler AI, Winxvideo AI, and Video2X.

I tested all three extensively. While each produced good results, none was perfect.

Unifab Upscaler AI – A capable and reasonably priced solution. However, upscaling a 480p video to a modest 720p resolution using the Fast profile increased the file size from the original 550 MB to 9.64 GB. I found this excessive and unacceptable for my needs.

Winxvideo AI – A solid application with a very user-friendly interface. Upscaling the same 550 MB video to 720p using high-quality settings took only 3.5 hours on my GTX 1660 Super, and I was generally pleased with the output quality. Unfortunately, the software is limited to 8-bit colour depth, even when using the HEVC codec. There appears to be no option to encode in 10-bit HEVC, which is necessary for HDR content. For this reason, it was not a suitable solution for me.

Video2X – A free and surprisingly powerful tool. It is not particularly beginner-friendly and requires some effort to configure properly. For example, the GUI does not support saving custom profiles. This may not be an issue for a one-off conversion, but when processing large batches of videos, having to re-enter settings every time becomes highly impractical. Fortunately, the command-line interface allows full automation. I created my own batch script with predefined settings and batch-processing support, which eliminated these limitations. After some initial setup work, Video2X proved to be the most suitable option for my requirements.

Conclusion: Video2X ultimately offered the best balance of quality, flexibility, and cost. Although it requires more effort to set up, its automation capabilities and zero cost made it the clear winner for my workflow.

edited:
I forgot to mention that Video2x latest version 6.4.0 removed ability to use Real-ESRGAN x2PLUS profile. It is hardcoded now for x4 upscaling, which is not good for me. So, it is basically limits anyone who does not need x4 upscale to only one AI model - for Anime & Cartoons.

Having said all this, I wonder if anyone knows and can help me how can I:

1. Manually change the bitrate in Unifab upscaler AI to control file size?
2. Force Winxvideo to use 10-bits with HEVC codec on High settings?