Hey everyone, Rodney here at Kleebz Tech, and
today I'll be talking about a powerful, free, AI-powered upscaling tool that you can run locally
on your computer. We'll cover how to use it, explore its features, and add custom
models. I'm talking about Upscayl. Now, if we look at their website, they do plan
on having a cloud service that is coming soon with a bunch of features, but today,
I'm going to be going over the downloaded version. They do offer versions for Linux,
Mac, and Windows, and I'll be using the Windows version here in the video. They offer an
installable version or a portable one. I prefer the portable because I can just extract
it to a folder, run everything in there, and I can move it around easily, but that's
up to you which way you prefer to do it. Now, as for compatibility, they do mention
needing a Vulcan compatible GPU to upscale images. Most dedicated GPUs should work, and
they do have some info on compatibility on GitHub if you run into any problems. Since
I'm running the Upscayl portable version, I do have just the folder, so I've extracted
that. If you have it installed, you can launch it how you would normally launch a program,
but since I have it in the portable version, I've just extracted the folder. I'm just
going to go ahead and launch the .exe file. Now, once you launch it, this is the interface
that you're going to have, and right away, you'll notice in the top left here we have
the batch options, so you can actually go into batch mode, select the folder, upscale a
bunch of images if you want to. You do want to make sure that that only contains supported file
types. You could even use this to upscale a video if you converted the video to a bunch of images,
upscale it, and bring it back in. I'm not going to cover how to do that, but that is something
I might experiment with myself at some point. I will mention if you're going to be putting
different types of images and doing batch, you probably, if you have digital art
or photos, you want to separate those because the results you're going to get from
different models to upscale is going to be different depending on the art style
that you're working with. So in here, I'm going to go back, turn off batch for this
purpose. I'm going to select my image now, you can either click on that and find the image,
or you can actually just drag your image in. So here we have a regular image I want
to use, a photo to start off with, this is an actual photo that I took, it's
a lower resolution one, and now in here, since it's a photograph type, I'm going to
change the model to a general photo. You can try different versions to see the results
that you get. If you're doing digital art, you'd want to do a digital art for that, you're
going to get different results depending on that image type. A double upscale if you want to
really upscale it, you can click that off, you're going to get a 16x upscale on your
image. Do keep in mind if it's a very large image resolution or anything like that, you may
run into some issues and it can take a while. You'd want to, if you want to change
your output folder and have it choose, go to a specific output folder, you can do
that here, otherwise, it's going to default to the same path of the file that you added to
upscale, and it's going to put the output into that same folder. And then we have the upscale
button which down here, it tells us what we're going to be going from and the resolution we're
going to end up with. So let's go ahead and hit upscale now. For upscales that aren't super
large, it actually runs pretty quickly I find. Okay, we have our image upscaled, and now
when we go over, you have multiple options, and this part, I do find a little bit bugged
out. So if we go over here to the right, you're going to have a tab where you can
choose the zoom or lens size. So let's go actually with the slider view first. So this
view, no, I got to turn off that Zoom amount, there we go, close that. Okay, now our slider,
we can use that to see the difference between the original and the upscaled one, and really,
don't see an awful lot here, it's hard to notice the differences when you do this. So,
this is the original, this is the upscaled. So the other option we have is you can go
to lens view, we can crank that way up if we want, and let's see, here we go. Now when we go
into this view, we can actually see around the circle is what the original one looked like,
and then the upscaled is inside that circle, so you can see the detail that was added.
Some things, I think it does better on, like in this image, I don't think it did the
bubbles quite as well, and that's where sometimes you can experiment with the different models to
see the results that you get out of those models. So, comes to the digital art, so I went ahead,
and I have already upscaled this previously, so I took this images here, this is an
original image I created in Mid Journey, I didn't upscale it or anything
like that in Mid Journey, just to give you an idea of the results you'll
get using photo versus the digital art model, upscaled it several times with different ones.
So on the left here, this is the original one, and then in the middle, we have the photo
model that I used which picked up more of the details of the face, and then on the right is the
digital art one, and as you can see, it smoothed out a lot of stuff, it got rid of all the smaller
details, which is something you may be going for, but that is something to be aware of, how these
models handle things differently, and different art styles, you may want to use different models
to get the results that you're looking for. Okay, so as far as the settings go in Upscayl,
our first options, obviously at the top is if you need help, you can click on this, it'll
bring you to the Upscayl Wiki on GitHub, and you can find some information on there.
There's not an awful lot, but then again, there's not an awful lot to the program either, so, but
you will find the discussions and everything in there. If you'd like to donate, you can do that
as well. You do have your logs here, and you can click on the copy logs for troubleshooting if
you need to copy and paste them into somewhere. Then you have the Upscayl theme, if you
want a different look, you can change these. I prefer just the default. You can also
change what the resulting image type is. Don't post-process the image, so if you click this
off, it won't do any of the post-processing, it'll just upscale and that's it. I haven't had, I
don't see really much difference between the two, I haven't run into any problems,
so I haven't used that option. Next up, you have the image scale
slider, if you, the default is 4X, but if you wanted to go down, you could change
that as well. If you want to do a custom width, you can put that in here, check that, and
that'll override your the settings above here for the actual scaling of the image. You
can also use image compression if you'd like, which seems to be experimental,
I haven't used that myself. If you want to have it saved to a specific output
folder and remember it, you can check this off, and it will remember it between sessions. Now the
override previous upscale, if you enable this, my understanding, and I don't use this, is once
you upscale an image, and you go back into here, it'll reuse the same image that you've already
upscaled into the next upscale. You can turn off notifications, so if you don't want
to get annoying chimes when it's done. Now, as far as the GPU ID goes, if you want
to, and a lot of times, this is only if you have any issues, if you don't have any issues,
you probably don't need to worry about it, but if you want to put your GPU ID in here, I
know mine's zero because if I go up to the log in here when I generated an image before, and I look
through the log, I will actually see right here, the number zero, Nvidia GeForce 370, so that
way, I know that's the number for the GPU that I'm using. You could put a different one if
you have multiples in there, stuff like that. The other thing you want to mention
is that you want to enable performance mode on Windows for better results.
I didn't find a big difference when I did that on Windows. All you need to
do if you go on your display settings, Windows 11 would be slightly different, but this
is on Windows 10. Yeah, sorry, Windows 10, and then I go down here to the graphics settings, and
in here, under graphics performance preference, I've already got it set for that, but let's say
I didn't, all I would do is click on browse, I'd go to the folder where I have my
Upscayl saved, I'm going to choose the . exe file. Now, if you have it installed, you have to go to your install folder
and find the .exe file in there, and then we are all set, and go into options,
and we can choose high performance, and save. Now, I believe I have my system set to high
performance anyways, so I don't think that's why I didn't see much of a difference when I
was running things. When you're doing basic upscaling, you probably won't notice much of a
difference, and it's probably that unimportant, but when you start doing like the larger 16x
upscales, that might be beneficial at that point. If you want to add custom models, you can do it
here. If we go to the Wiki guide for Upscayl, and then you go into your custom models
over here, and I'll include a link in the description of the video for this, but if we
go to our, the Wiki under the custom models, you'll find they actually do have some
in here, and they explain how to convert models if you want to. So in here, I go to
custom models repository, they have listed, which will bring us to here, and I'm going to go
ahead and download this repository, and I'm going to save it. So this is my Upscayl folder here, I'm
going to go ahead and save my zip file in there. Okay, so we have it downloaded here, so
I'm going to just go ahead and extract all, extract it into here, I go ahead and delete
that. So now I have a new folder in here, so all I need to do now, once I have the
folder where I want it, I'll go into here, select the folder, and we have ours in here. There
we go, and we now have our custom models added. And the last option in here is reset upscale,
that will reset all your settings back to default. So now with the, when it comes to the custom
models, if we go back to our main menu, you're going to now notice we have more models in
here. I'm not going to go into all the different what each one of these does, they do have on
their website down here, it kind of explains what each one is good for, what they do, and
that pretty much covers the settings of Upscayl. You're going to have to do a lot of trial and
error with any of these things. I do find, I use Fooocus for generating AI images, and I do
find, I found the upscaling in there works better for the initial two times upscale, and then
I'll bring it into here, upscale it further. Now, for this example, this one, I generated in
Fooocus, it's the default size, I haven't upscaled it in Fooocus or anything like that. So for this
one, I just want to show the comparison of using, I think this will give you a good idea of the
digital art versus the photo. So for the photo, I'm going to go ahead and upscale that, and we'll
look at that, and then I'm going to show you what the digital results will look like for the same
image. Once we've done it with the photo version, you can see, it maintains its look of
a photo, and it adds a lot more detail, but if we go over and we change this to
digital art and I upscale it that way, you're going to see that the hair and
stuff like that is not going to be as fine. Detail, you get a lot more smooth effects, that's
what you're going to find between the digital art and the photo results. On the right would be the
digital art one, on the left is the photo one, and you can see that the digital art one
is smooth, smooth things out a little more, the photo one adds a little more detail for the
hair, and then you have a lot of other ones if you add. I find some of these additional
models do a pretty good job depending on the image. So this is the original photo of
the tree that fell down outside my house, uh, during the snowstorm, or actually just the
branch. So I took that photo, upscaled it, and on the left is the original photo, and on
the right is the upscaled photo using the photo, General photo, the, the, the, the default
option in Upscayl, and if we go in even further, you can see a lot more of the detail was added,
and I find overall, it does a pretty good job. I occasionally will get images I'm not happy with,
but I find that's the case with a lot of things. I do compare it to some of the other ones, one of my favorite online upscaler is
Magnific AI, that does a phenomenal job, but it's also very expensive, that's
the downfall with that one. Now, for this image here, the one on the
left is the original, and then we, I used the photo one in the middle, and
then on the right is the digital art one, give you an idea of how each one handles
things differently. So for this one, as a digital art image, I would much rather have
the one on the right, I think it does much better. And then I took an old photo I had here, and
on the left is the original, and on the right is the upscaled version, and we zoom in, we
can actually see, it did a really good job on overall the D detailed in, and added, but it's
not always going to make every image look perfect, some images just won't go well. So this is
a one I have that's a pretty low quality, an older image, and if we go in here, and we
do the upscale on the general photo, upscale, this one is a perfect example of one that
really isn't going to get much better. I mean, it does add some details, it but the problem is,
it doesn't have a lot of details to begin with, so the resulting image, just, I don't think is
going to be that much, I mean, it's a little better, but that's probably the most I would
upscale it, upscaling it even more than that, it just smooths everything out, so you're
not going to work miracles, necessarily, um, with images. This is another one I did,
and I can't demonstrate it any other way, easily because this limit image is so large,
this one on the right is almost 600 GB in size, 32,000 pixels by 18,000, ha, if we zoom in, we
can see how much a difference that actually makes. Now the original image was already upscaled, I
had done that at Magnific, and then I upscaled it again with Upscayl, so unless you can or want
to pay for an online upscaler like Magnific AI, which I think is probably the best upscaler at the
moment, I recommend Upscayl as my go-to upscaler. If you found this video helpful, please consider
hitting the like button or even buying me a cup of coffee, which really does make a difference.
Thanks for watching and have fun creating.
