Let's Enhance - Using Neural Networks to Improve Image Quality

[bannertime]

Recently announced in tech blogs and such is letsenhance.io. "Free online image upscale and JPEG artifact removal using neural networks. Image super-resolution and image enhancement online."

I've got a job right now where they supplied a 150kb image to use as the background for a retractable banner. I was able to reverse search and found a 3.5mb version of the image on one of their blogs. So I'm going to do a little test. See how well we can get the 150kb image to match up to the 3.5mb once scaled up and improved with the neural network.

Waiting...waiting. The 3.5mb file is going to take 20 mins to upscale. The 150kb is just a few minutes.

There are three modes; anti-jpeg, boring, and magic.

Anti-Jpeg obviously attempts to remove artifacts.
Boring "does up-scaling and doesn't hallucinate fine details. This is good for illustrations, logos, vectors, etc."
Magic "does hallucinate a bit, so it's perfect for photos."

The latter two of which promise a 4x upscale.

Attached is a collage of the enhancements for comparison. This does not include the "enhanced" 3.5mb file.

 

[morty87]

Hello, thanks for the info. I gave it a try but unless I am doing something wrong...although it is a much bigger image the pixelation is still really bad. I guess maybe it's a bit better but not enough for me to see any real difference. I will play around with it more but thanks.

 

[bannertime]

Hello, thanks for the info. I gave it a try but unless I am doing something wrong...although it is a much bigger image the pixelation is still really bad. I guess maybe it's a bit better but not enough for me to see any real difference. I will play around with it more but thanks.

It's been a hot minute since I tried. I believe the "Boring" mode produced the best results with my test. I actually haven't used it since then. My other enlargements have been with Photoshop's Preserve Details 2.0 or ON1 Resize. Mainly because I didn't have to upload/download anything else.

Let's Enhance isn't at a point where it's going to produce pixel perfect enhancements. It's filling in the blanks. That means, with detailed photos, it's just going to make it "appear" higher resolution. It'll be a larger file, for sure, but the details will not be there.