Upscaling

Introduction

Upscaling in digital media is a technique used to resize images and videos.

It is used to neither lower the image or video resolution, or higher it.

Image upscaling and video upscaling, are very different from each other even though they have the same general idea.

Upscaling is used in TV’s, General photo and video editing, video games (Nvidia DLSS) and more…

Some upscalers use AI’s (Artificial Intelligence) which learns how to upscale better over time.

Image Upscaling

When downscaling (lowering the image resolution), the image will look worse but it will be 100% accurate to the original.

When upscaling image (Highering the image resolution), it is a bit more complicated:

If the image got vector graphics, which are graphics that always look sharp, no metter the resolution, the image will be 100% accurate to the original.

If the image got raster graphic (bitmap graphics) i.e the image is made by pixels, which is the more common type of grahics, the resulted image may not be 100% accurate to the original, and may look worse at some cases.

Video Upscaling

When downscaling a video, it will look better than it would otherwise look if the same video was filmed as the result resolution of the downscale.

For example: if a video you downscale from 4K to full HD, you’re essentially oversampling the image to have 4x the data for every pixel. Therefore, when you have 4K footage and downscale it to 1080p (Full HD), the image is going to look better than it would at native 1080p.

When upscaling a video, same as upscaling a raster graphics image, the resolted video may not be 100% accurate to the original, and may look worse at some cases.

Common Upscalers

Upscalers can be found and accessed online or as a downloadable client for your computer.

The most popular upscalers are:Waifu2X,Vance AI image inlarger and FFMPEG. of course, there are a lot more upscalers out there.