Upscalers discussion (software)

[yano2mch]

Heh, color me shocked. Realistic scaler, combined with de-jpeg...



But i have to use chaiNNer to do it (though i can do ALL the passes at once. but i HATE the visual style, i'm a programmer, i want to just tell it what to do, not find the command place it visually and then follow the lines and connect nodes... Uggg. The above chaiNNer template image is a prototype and not cleaned up at all, you can see a lot of disabled nodes).

Though i can totally avoid the band reducer bit, and use upscale models upscayl doesn't allow... i think.

I might drop Upscayl for chaiNNer and other models.

 

[yano2mch]

Alright, did some upscales of other higher quality models outside of upscayl, honestly the realistic upscaler looks best, but each has their own merit depending on how blunt detailed or popout. Regardless they are all better than the originals, and i must say a bit better than upscayl too.

Like Hand Maid May, a few extra processes could clean it up more (dejpeg, edge enhancing, etc). Though for these i did do a dejpeg pass. All through chaiNNer so i could append the upscaler name too.











Personally it looks like 4xBHI_dat2_otf_nn is best for real images, Realistic scaler is great for anime and just about everything. And PonirSwin is good for the grainy comicbooks and just about everything (thought it's intended moreso for MLP).

They all seem okay at grayscale manga, ponirSwin will turn 1-2bit to greyscale, otherwise they seemed okay. But there's a few upscalers specifically for this style that is better. Still, nice to see. Sufficiently high resolution it won't matter and they take more diamonds, but Realistic scaler barfs.

 

[yano2mch]

Doing some tests on old anime, Dragon Drive and DragonBall. The three models that have the highest most promising results are, 4x_RealisticRescaler_100000_G, 4x-WTP-UDS-Esrgan and 4x-Ultrasharp. Though it's more a tossup between realistic and WTP. Naturally you'll get fairly bad results on tiny under detailed figures, but looks good otherwise.

There's an upscale test i did with Hand-Maid May, which you'll see on Civitai. Reposting as a gif would be 30Mb for what is 2Mb of data. Got the whole first episode upscaled; But the fonts embedded in the mkv file aren't letting me replace the video feed so i can't make upgraded anime files. What fun. Mkv manipulation put off for another day.