Best AI Tools for Upscaling Images
Just a few years ago, it wasn’t possible to upscale small images without substantial loss of quality. The resulting images were blurry and hardly usable for anything.
Then came AI alongside related technologies such as machine learning (ML) and neural networks, which made it possible to upscale images without any loss in quality.
This is made possible thanks to algorithms that were trained on huge sets of images, and they can “predict” the elements that are getting blurrier with the upscaling of an image. As a result, you get a bigger image that is also sharp enough to be used in printed materials — which tend to require higher-resolution photos.
All being said, here are some of the best tools you could use to upscale your images, with some of them offering additional bells and whistles:
Upscale.media by PixelBin.io
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- An easy way to upscale images
- Mobile app for upscaling on the go
- API access for integration with other apps and services
- Free version is rather limited
Upscale.media is a platform that serves as an AI image enhancer, enabling users to upscale images while maintaining superior quality. It lets users easily enhance visuals, with support for different image types — including PNG, JPG, JPEG, and WEBP.
The maximum output resolution and size is 1500 x 1500 pixels and 25 MB.
Everyone can try out Upscale.media for free, and then sign-up for the premium offering to upscale even more images. Those calculations take serious resources, and it’s only obvious that a service like this can’t be free forever.
Upscale.media supports bulk transformations, allowing you to upload multiple images at once. Also, it offers an API that enables developers to integrate Upscale.media’s capabilities into their apps and services to speed up their workflows and enhance productivity.
Finally, it’s worth adding that the tool offers a mobile app, so you can upscale images even while on the go. Pretty cool.
Let’s Enhance
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- One tool for resizing, upscaling, and sharpening your photos
- API access for integration with third-party apps
- Ability to generate art with AI is included
- No mobile app
Let’s Enhance is dubbed the “automated AI image upscaler and fixer.” It uses so-called “Super Resolution” technology — based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks along with other machine learning techs — to do its magic.
Just a few years ago, it was impossible to dramatically increase photo size without losing quality, with the best options only making pictures blurry.
Then came the age of AI, ML, and Neural Networks, enabling tools like Let’s Enhance to add extra details and pixels to photos much better than traditional software. This was made possible thanks to modern algorithms, which have been trained on a huge dataset of pictures.
Today, Let’s Enhance lets you resize pictures, making them crisp, clear and ready for any web and print format. And as a result, you get to save time for (more) creative tasks.
The tool works with all kinds of imagery, from old photos to digital art, from portraits to landscapes, and from logos to product images. It also lets you generate art with text prompts and can be integrated with other software through its API.
Nero AI Image Upscaler
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Allows anyone to upscale their images
- Extremely useful for e-commerce websites & marketing materials
- Also great for enhancing old photos
- Where's the mobile app?
Nero AI Image Upscaler is an AI-powered tool that can enlarge image size and resolution while maintaining high quality.
Free to use, it will make your photos sharper, clearer, and of course – bigger.
As such, it is described as ideal for enhancing product photos, real estate marketing images, and adding details to luxurious art digital paintings. But you can just as easily use it for anything else.
Ultimately, Nero AI Image Upscaler is meant to save you time and money when taking pictures and turning images into high-resolution masterpieces. Or when you need to sharpen blurry or old photos quickly and easily.
Whether you are a designer, a student, a meme lover, a painter, or just someone who wants to play with AI – you may want to check out Nero AI Image Upscaler.
Clipdrop by stability.ai
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Multiple image editing tools in one place
- Reasonable pricing
- Mobile app lets you play with your photos while on the go
- Free plan will add a watermark to generated and upscaled images
Clipdrop offers a set of AI-enabled image editing tools that let creators “create stunning visuals in seconds.”
Before editing, however, you may want to create a new image from scratch. Clipdrop offers a tool for that, as well. Powered by the popular Stable Diffusion model, it lets you generate high-resolution, realistic images with a simple prompt. And, if you don’t like the initial result – you can always ask for more variants of the image.
There is also the Uncrop tool that lets you extend existing images, the one that will transform your doodles into real images, and the AI upscaler that can make your images bigger — all while removing noise.
Next comes the Cleanup tool, using which you can remove objects, people, text and other defects from your pictures.
Plus, there is a tool for removing the background from your images and extracting the main subject with ease, one for replacing the background, as well as the Sky Replacer, so you can always get sunny days in your photos.
All in all, we would say that Clipdrop did an excellent job of collecting different image editing tools in a single place.
Cutout.Pro by LibAI Lab
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
- Easy to use, yet the results could be nothing short of impressive
- The background removal feature alone is worth the premium
- Great for online store operators
- The free version is limited to low-resolution images
Cutout.Pro is an AI-powered visual design platform offering a range of products and services that are meant to improve efficiency and stimulate creativity. The main focus of this platform, however, is to facilitate image and video design using state-of-the-art AI technologies.
Cutout.Pro’s most popular tools include Image Background Removal, Photo Enhancer & Upscaler, and Background Diffusion. As you can imagine, these allow you to remove unwanted objects or persons, remove video backgrounds, and segment faces and hair with fine details. As a result, these tools make editing tasks easier and more efficient without needing professional skills or manual labor.
Also included with Cutout.Pro are AI art generation features. These enable users to create AI-generated art and edit the background of photos using text. There are also AI-powered photo and video enhancers that can improve the resolution, quality, and details of images and videos.
Furthermore, the platform’s Photo Animer can transform static photos into moving videos, and the Photo Colorizer – which can turn black and white images into color.
Cutout.Pro provides solutions for different needs. For instance, their Image Design is meant to replace Photoshop in some cases. Also, there are specific solutions for online store operators, developers, old photo restoration, customized printing, and more. Each of these is designed to solve specific problems or enhance certain areas of image and video editing and design.
Finally, Cutout.Pro has an API allowing developers to incorporate the platform’s AI technology into their applications and quickly process many images and videos.
What can you do with AI tools for image upscaling?
The answer to this is obvious – you can make your images bigger, but why would you need to do that? Here are some ideas:
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Restore old photos
Old photos are notorious for being too small, as “back in the day,” the resolution of cameras was low. Now, you can take those photos and make them bigger without losing any quality. It’s like saving a part of your and your family’s life in a digital form (that’s what most users do with old photos).
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Prepare printed materials
Standard images made for the web are too small to be used for printing – they end up blurry and/or “dotted” when printed out. Not if you can first make the image that was meant for the web much bigger. And that’s where these sorts of tools kick in.
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Make bigger images for websites
This can be fairly important for agencies developing websites for clients, which may send their low-res and/or small photos you can’t work with. Or you can’t place them into a “hero slider” on the homepage. Here too, AI tools for image upscaling can help – allowing you to create much bigger images from the smaller ones.
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Sharpen photos
On the other hand, you may get to work with blurry photos, which you simply cannot use. The same tools that enable image upscaling tend to enable sharpening, as well. This is because the underlying technology is pretty much the same, and as part of the upscaling process – images are also sharpened in the output.
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Product photos
The last thing we’ll mention is the need to have good product photos on every e-commerce website that actually wants to sell something to the users. If you have the “luck” of getting smaller images from your client/partner – you can use AI tools for upscaling to make product photos look great.
We’ve just scratched the surface here, but you get the idea why someone would want to use an AI tool for image upscaling. That being said, you may want to check out some of the more powerful tools listed on this page that will also let you do other things with your images. It is a good idea/practice to have one tool for multiple use cases. Or so we think.