If you want to increase the size of an image quickly and without complications, any basic editor will help you accomplish that task. However, with the assistance of different artificial intelligence models, it is now possible to increase the size, reduce quality loss, and minimize the impact of artifacts at the same time. The open source tool NiceScaler is one of the most promising, with four AI models available to experiment with.
It has happened to us so many times that we can't count them: we search for an image, find exactly what we need, but the maximum available size is equivalent to a postage stamp. Any conventional photo editor can increase its size using sampling methods like bilinear, bicubic, and "nearest neighbor" (which works very well in retro games), but artifacts and quality loss are the order of the day. While Hollywood keeps shouting "enhance" with its magic cameras, in real life we need pixels. Unless…
… artificial intelligence steps in. Developments like Waifu2x, advanced neural network training, and technologies at the level of CUDA and OpenCL completely revolutionized image processing. At first it may seem intimidating, but several tools with graphical interfaces put all this firepower within our reach, and one of them is NiceScaler.
How to increase the size of an image with artificial intelligence
NiceScaler supports four AI models: FSRCNN (usually associated with waifu2x), ESPCN (Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Network), LapSRN (Laplacian Pyramid Super-Resolution Network), and EDSR (Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution).
The first two options, FSRCNN and ESPCN, are by far the fastest, taking only two seconds to process an image. LapSRN needed ten seconds to complete its task, and EDSR is the slowest model by a wide margin. The program warns of this difference, but EDSR took 673 seconds with 16 processing threads and more than 8 GB of RAM allocated.
Beyond choosing the model and setting the upscaling value, the interface has no advanced options. Images or groups of images are dragged directly onto the window, but this also extends to videos. If you want to increase the resolution of a short or episode, NiceScaler can do it for you.
The only technical detail worth highlighting about NiceScaler is that for now it only uses the CPU for upscaling, and CUDA / OpenCL / Vulkan support will be included later. If you want to increase the size of an image without headaches, download a copy of NiceScaler, and give it a try!
Official site and download: Click here
