The Best Image Upscaler For Your Favorite Holiday Pics

Have you ever taken a photo so perfect you want to blow it up and put it on your bedroom wall? Any chance that you come into a situation like this: you captured a beautiful image on your phone and want to blow up this image and make a huge wall portrait? Then, this situation brings a problem: how to upscale images to that size? If you are bothered by this sort of questions, this article is for you. We are sharing some of the best image upscaler tools that can benefit your experience.

Why Should You Prefer An AI Image Upscaler?

Now there are two types of image upscalers in the market: the manual ones (like Photoshop and GIMP) and the AI-based ones (DVDFab, Remini, etc.). The key reason why AI image upscalers are better is that you don't need technical knowledge to use them.

Image enhancement used to be an art. Photographers would spend hours trying to fill in pixels into your image using an image upscaler software and make it look just as good in an upscaled version as it does in the original.

Not any more! AI image upscalers make use of AI techniques to generate the pixels using millions of images that they have already processed earlier and prepare an "AI model" which knows how to fill in pixels automatically.

So if you don't want to spend days learning the techniques and magic of manual image upscalers, you can get an image that is just as good by using an AI-powered image upscaler

What Should You Look For In an AI Image Upscaler Software?

It's nice to have software that can upscale your pictures, but it's nicer if it can do a bit more than just that: most software out there offer a lot of good photo editing tools, so you should look for the best price vs. features on what you are buying.

Here's a sample of features that I realized were useful for a project like mine; you should check them out too.

Image Upscaling

If you want to magnify an image to be large enough to cover a wall, you need software that can do some real magic. Even AI models would find it hard to fill in pixels into a photo that large!

You should look for an image upscaler that can upscale your image at least 20-40 times the current size, not just 2x or 3x.

Image Enhancement

While not necessary, this is a great feature to have. Photos taken from camera phones are typically never as good as ones taken on a DSLR, so if you can get a tool that can do a bit of sharpening here and quality improvement there, that's a wonderful thing to have.

DeNoiser

Have you ever shot a photo from your camera phone and found it looking a bit grainy, just like an old movie on a VHS tape? That's a fairly common occurrence, and it's called "Noise."

Since it happens far too often, if you are looking for an upscaler you might as well also search for something that can denoise your photo first. Because if there is even a little bit of noise in your photo on a small scale, the moment you use an image upscaler, it will start looking that much worse!

Removing Blurs

That's another common problem with photos - the subject moves just as you are taking the photo, leaving an otherwise perfect shot looking as though you took it from a speeding train.

If you are planning to upscale an image, a somewhat acceptable blur in a camera pic will look immensely worse on a wall-sized photo.

Colorizer

While I didn't need this particular feature, it is a useful one to have. If you had ever thought of gifting your grandparents a picture of their wedding or something else from a time when pictures used to be shot in black and white, you would understand what I am talking about.

AI-powered image upscalers have started offering this immensely useful feature of converting b&w pics into color these days. By using their AI models, they fill in colors based on the best estimate of where the picture was shot and in which year.

This is a nice to have feature, not absolutely necessary, but you should look for it nonetheless.

Now that you know the main features to look for, let's look at some products available in the market, and which one is best for what purpose.

The Best Image Upscalers You can Use

Here we made a list of the best image upscalers you can use to improve your image quality.

DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI - the most recommended image upscaler

By far, this is one of the best products on the market when it comes to image upscaling. Let's look at some of the main features.

Upscale Image 40x

DVDFab's Image Upscaler can take any type of picture and expand it forty times its original size!

I could understand how some image editors are able to do this for some photos like anime and cartoons and stuff(it's just a man-made digital photo, after all). But how does DVDFab understand exactly how to fill in the information in a real image drawn from my phone's camera?

Well, this is where the genuine magic of AI can be found. By using several similar photos, analyzing face attributes, body shapes, as well as various other such details, DVDFab's picture enhancer has actually ended up taking pictures upscaling to new levels.

It can take a photo with a comparatively low resolution, include details to it to make the picture crisper, sharper, and also a lot more perfect, even add some information to blurred pixels so that the new upscaled photo is even better than your original one. Even at 40 times, my images brought out every detail very crisply and sharply!

Enhance Picture Quality

If you have taken the picture at the wrong time of the day, or there is a bit of darkness in the wrong spots, or the image resolution isn't that good, your photo will look that much duller in an upscaled version.

DVDFab's image enhancer was able to improve the quality of my photos to the point where they almost looked like they were shot from a DSLR camera instead of my poor old phone camera. It was almost like magic!

Colorize Photos

This is one of the few applications on the internet that can add color to a photo that is Black and White and do it properly. There are some other AI apps that claim to do it, but in my opinion, DVDFab did a hell of a lot better job than any other competitor on the market.

Make Cartoons For Fun

Sometimes it's fun to convert a photo of yourself into a cartoon just for laughs and share it with your friends. And sometimes, you may want to convey an emotion without actually putting up a personal picture on the internet.

Cartoonization is a great feature to have for an image upscaler and photo editor, and DVDFab did a perfect job here as well.

Noise Removal

Your photo will look really dull if you have noise in the background because it will make your photo look grainy.

DVDFab has a one-button DeNoiser that uses AI algorithms to remove all background noise and make your picture the best version of itself.

Sharpen

DVDFab also uses proprietary AI algorithms to sharpen your images and bring in the perfect contrast and color to the photo to make it look beautiful.

DeBlur

Even the slightest blur in a photo will look really bad if you upscale it. DVDFab was able to completely remove the slight blur in my photo and make it look like it had been shot perfectly, to begin with.

Enhancing Animes

There is a huge market for enhancing anime images among fans, and the only tool most people are familiar with is waifu2x (a free online software created by MIT).

However, DVDFabs product does wonders here as well because, with their proprietary AI technology, they can enhance anime by up to 40 times the size of the original!

AI Image Enlarger

AI Image Enlarger is another very good AI-based image upscaling program. It can enhance images upto 8x the original size upto (16000*16000px), using their own AI models, which they have developed.

AI Image enlarger can also optimize the image, enhance its quality, denoise, and deblur.

This company also has a more advanced version of image upscaling software called AI Image Upscaler. This version focuses on processing photos in batch mode and is a good option for a professional image upscaling application like a photo agency.

What I liked about AI Image Enlarger:

• Easy to use AI-based software. Upload images and click the enlarger button. That's it
• Output image quality was quite good
• Very quick. Image upscaling took only a few seconds
• It has a background removal tool which is quite useful sometimes

What I didn't like:

• This is an online-based tool; you have to upload the images to the site. That means security will always be a concern for private images
• The image upscaling is only upto 8x, which is good enough for desktop wallpapers but not for making actual wall-sized portraits
• It cannot cartoonize images

Waifu2x

Waifu2x can increase the image size while removing noise from an image. Its name is derived from anime-style "Waifu" artwork. Even though Waifus makes up the majority of the data for this AI, this API can do well even on other kinds of pictures.

You can make use of Waifu2x to increase the dimension of your photo and enhance quality as well. Waifu2x is free to use. You can pick the style of your picture and how much noise reduction you want. However, this program supports up to 2x upscaling only, which is too little for most applications.

Waifu2x also offers this project under an open-source license, so anyone can use and market duplicates of this program. There are picture upscaler tools like waifu2x.pro and bigjpg that are based on the underlying AI from this program.

What I like about Waifu2x:

• Absolutely free to use
• Does a good job of removing noise while enhancing image size

What I didn't like:

• Only 2x upscaling means, it's not good enough for any major applications
• It doesn't have other features like Deblur, image enhancers, cartoonizer, and colorizer
• Its an online tool, so image safety is a concern
• The AI is mostly based on Anime images, so sometimes the result on human pictures are not that great

Which Image Upscaler is Best For Me?

Let's compare these three products so that you can make the best choice for your project:

As you can see, the three products compete on different strengths.

DVDFab's product is clearly the most complete image upscaler for your pics, whereas AI Image Enlarger does some of the things well but doesn't give you an unlimited license to upscale as many photos as you want. Waifu2x is a nice piece of freeware, but it's not very useful for most things.

If you want a professional-level image upscaler at a reasonable cost, DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI is the best option for you.