Compared two AI photo upscalers last week and one was clearly ahead

I ran about 50 old family photos through Topaz Gigapixel and through a free open-source tool called Real-ESRGAN. The Topaz software handled faces way better, especially on pictures from the early 2000s with bad lighting. Real-ESRGAN kept making skin look waxy and smooth like a doll. Has anyone else found a free upscaler that doesn't have that issue?

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nelson.finley4mo ago

Did you mess with the settings in Real-ESRGAN? The default settings are pretty aggressive and make everything look like plastic. I found that turning down the face enhancement slider and using a lower scaling factor kept the skin texture looking natural. The waxy look happens when it tries too hard to guess details that aren't there. Topaz is definitely better out of the box, but with some tweaking the free one can get close on simpler photos.

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derek9394mo ago

Read an article about this that said the training data for Real-ESRGAN has a lot of compressed jpegs and it just assumes every face needs that heavy smoothing. I tried lowering the scale to 2x instead of 4x and it made a HUGE difference on old scanned photos. Also turned off tile processing for smaller images since that can cause weird looking consistency between sections. The face enhancement slider really is the main culprit for that plastic look though.

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