[Phredreeke]

It's not the only model in the upscale process. I never use Nickelback by itself, always with something to depixelize the image before processing. I'll see about uploading some pics of the upscale at that part of the process. Also worth mentioning is people on Discord said they'd prefer more gritty than cartoonish upscales.

Interpolating with XBRDD is generally to bring stability to the model. I'll also make sure to put up some examples of having it upscale the difference image vs using it raw.

Edit: Here's a slide-over comparison https://imgsli.com/ODYzMjI add-proc2 is with the difference mask upscaled with xbrdd-spongebob reloaded. add-proc1 simply used a bilinear upscale of the difference mask. the other two are self-explanatory I think

[MrFlibble]

I just learned that the creator of original ESRGAN released a new tool called Real-ESRGAN. Has anyone tried this yet? The portable version does not work for me because apparently I don't have a suitable GPU.

[Phredreeke]

You can run it your browser here

This is what Joey on the Discord had to say about it

Quote

Real-ESRGAN is the same arch as regular esrgan technically btw, it just has renamed layers. Except for the "video" models, which use a VGG-based architecture

[Phredreeke]

Bottom half is all AI.

Link if you wanna try it out yourself

[MrFlibble]

I must be doing something wrong because the site gives me an error. Should I delete the lower half and fill in a specific colour?

[Phredreeke]

No, it blanks the lower half automatically.

[MrFlibble]

Hmm, that's what I assumed but somehow it did not work. Maybe try again later.

[MrFlibble]

I remembered how you used the NMKD DeGif model in an attempt to upscale small Daggerfall NPPC flats, and gave it a go in trying to clean up certain dithered sprites from Aleona's Tales. I scaled both an NMKD DeGif upscale and a PixelPerfect 4x one back to the original dimensions and blended them with G'MIC. I think it worked rather fine: side-by-side comparison.

[Phredreeke]

I used GPEN to upscale the faces in the end credit screens of Duke3D (posting these here and not the horror thread because the results were actually good, and yes I’m aware that the photos used for these exist in higher resolution already, I just did it as a test)
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/311884728317771777/977690212446662726/IMG_0471.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/311884728317771777/977688840695328789/IMG_0468.png

Slide over for the second

[MrFlibble]

Seems to work pretty well!

[Phredreeke]

I’m bumping this thread because of a discovery I and VGames did when discussing upscales, rather than just unsightly stuff from various neural networks

Chainner let’s you use ESRGAN models for upscaling the alpha channel. This doesn’t produce very nice looking results when upscaling sprites though.

I suggested he’d use the Unresize model in chainner rather than my downscaling script. To my surprise it smoothed out the previously harsh and jagged edges of the upscale.

Worth considering, especially with all the trouble we’ve had with making sprite masks

[MrFlibble]

IIRC that ESRGAN build that I found a while back did a pretty decent job with upscaling the alpha channel. What was it called again? ESRGAN-Joey IIRC.