Writing up a project, I kept hitting old low-res screenshots too blurry to drop into the report, with no original data to regenerate them. I tried AI upscaling to salvage them a few times, hit some snags, and worked out an order — plus, more importantly, when it simply can't be done.
Boundary first, because it decides whether the time is worth spending. I built an image with text and thin lines, shrank it to different ratios and enlarged it back, and measured how much high-frequency detail survived.
The numbers are blunt: shrink to 1/2, about 52% of detail left; to 1/4, about 20%; to 1/8, only 9%. Desktop Chromium, one image, so it's only about this picture — but the principle is general. Past a point, the original detail is genuinely gone, and super-resolution isn't finding it, it's painting a plausible guess in its place. So a figure that matters — an experimental data plot, a formula screenshot, anything someone checks against — if it's badly blurred, don't count on upscaling; that's writing content in. The everyday "just make it look nicer" images are where it belongs.
Once that's clear, the steps are simple. Pick a mode: ImgIng gives five, and I run the fast one first to see if it's worth continuing; text and lines go to fidelity, an old faded photo to old-photo restoration, a face or natural background to the texture tiers. Don't reach for the heaviest tier out of "best must be best" — heavy is slow and hungry, try the fast one to find the direction first.
Then the multiplier — not bigger-is-clearer. Phones and already-large images take 2x; only a small image you genuinely need enlarged goes to 4x. And check the edges at 100%: look at whether letters got repainted into other letters, whether a regular texture grew detail the original didn't have. There's a pixel-compare slider for exactly this — drag it against the original, don't just glance at "looks clearer" and ship.
One mistake I made early: assuming "highest tier + 4x" was the best setup. I ran a plain lecture screenshot through the high-end tier at 4x, waited a while, and the edges came out with texture the original never had — it looked more "AI", not more real. Tier and multiplier are chosen by the image and its use, not by "I want the best". Over-enhancing just makes the model invent more.
Last thing, don't skip it: after any fix, drag that compare slider one more time. Sharpening and re-runs can introduce new artefacts, and contraction especially tends to eat something where you weren't looking. I flip through it once more and only export when nothing new has shown up.
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