← Glossary

What is upscaling?

Upscaling increases width/height. Naive upscaling stretches existing pixels and looks soft.

When Real-ESRGAN weights are installed, ImgifyTools can run super-resolution. When they are not, the upscaler still returns correctly sized output via high-quality LANCZOS resize.

Start from the cleanest original you have—no upscaler recovers optical information that was never captured.

Good uses: enlarging a slightly small catalog hero, preparing a print from a decent phone photo, recovering readability on a logo raster.

Poor uses: turning a tiny 100-pixel face into a billboard, or “fixing” extreme motion blur. Reshoot when stakes are high.

After upscale, you may still need light sharpening or compression for the delivery channel. Keep the pre-upscale master archived.

Related tool: Image Upscaler