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Show HN: I made an AI image enhancer that boosts images 10x to 12k pixels
Hey HN,
My wife is a designer, and one day she asked me if there was a tool to enhance images and improve their quality. I recommended a few to her, but she found that the suitable ones were too expensive, and the more affordable options didn't offer enough magnification, most only going up to 2x or 4x.
So, I thought, why not create a tool that meets her needs, one that can greatly enhance image resolution and clarity while being very affordable to use?
After over a month of effort, I finally completed this tool. It can now enlarge images up to 10 times, with a maximum support of 12,000 pixels.
I hope this tool will be as helpful to you as it is to my wife. would love your feedback pls
Charles
- thatcat 2y agoGreat work man, i would love to know more about the process! did you take existing images and degrade them then use the high res version as a confirmation or how'd you do it?
- yangxiaobo 2y agoIn the demo image, I used a relatively blurry picture for enhancement, so the difference appears more noticeable.
- thatcat 2y agoi meant how did you prepare the dataset for training
- arcastroe 2y agoCurious, does this use a publicly available model (such as real-esrgan), or is it a custom model? To reach 10x magnification, is 2x magnification simply consecutively repeated?
- godelski 2y agoI'm also curious about this (as a researcher myself). It would be nice to know what model is used (or if this is actually novel[0]). It is also worth mentioning the legal issues of this, and since you are charging(?) for this, you can be in legal jeopardy[1]. The architecture might be under some license and if you tuned a model that might also be under a license (it is worse if these are not under a license!). Most research software is under MIT licenses, but it is starting to become less common. If you trained or tuned an existing model that does not necessitate you release the checkpoint, which let's be honest, that's the secret sauce. [0] I don't expect this as even most of the research is not novel. There's so much railroading where things build on top of one another. But that is also the nature of how we create things. Not by giant leaps. [1] lol, open source is stolen all the time. Legal action is really unlikely. But let's admit this is unethical.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoThank you for your professional reminder. Currently, I am using a third-party API directly and haven't paid attention to specific licensing details. Your reminder has brought this to my attention, and I will make sure to address it. Thank you for the heads-up.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoCurrently, we are using a third-party API directly. Based on my tests, if you enlarge an image repeatedly, the first enlargement might make the image too large, causing the second attempt to fail.
- Workaccount2 2y agoGood work, what are you using on the backend for this?
- mittermayr 2y agoFinally all the CSI and detective shows are believable again: ENHANCE!!!
- jasfi 2y agoThese enhance effects typically use guesswork. That would be useful to gain hints, but not to know for sure what the original looked like.
- thih9 2y agoUnless the rest of the image offers details that the human observer would ignore but the AI would pick up. E.g. low res photo from 1828 of a US president - enhance to John Quincy Adams. Surprisingly there's a daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams from 1843[1], the AI could use that; perhaps "enhance" the time backwards a bit, to make him 15 years younger. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Quincy_Adams_-_copy_of_1843_Philip_Haas_Daguerreotype.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Quincy_Adams_-_cop...
- itishappy 2y agoRight, and that would be guesswork unless the image had been explicitly tagged.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoThere are search engines that search for similar images; a small photo of John Quincy Adams may be 99.99% identifiable as such.
- itishappy 2y agoAn educated guess then, maybe even a good one! What happens if it's only 80% sure? Do you get a high-res John Quincy Adams or an admission that it can't identify the image content? If I feed it a low-res picture of Michael Faraday or Henry Clay, will I receive the finely sculpted jowls of John Quincy Adams in return?
- givinguflac 2y agoReally interested in this, but it needs additional login options. Not a Google user myself but would like to check this out.
- tossstone 2y agoAgree. I see no reason why Google should be the only means to log in
- yangxiaobo 2y agoI'm very sorry, I usually use Google the most. Could you please let me know your preferred login method? Email or something else? I will add some additional login options.
- tossstone 2y agoEmail is preferred for me (no oauth) unless there is a particular need to access data on something like a Google account for the service to function
- yangxiaobo 2y agoI'm very sorry, I usually use Google the most. Could you please let me know your preferred login method? Email or something else?
- worksonmine 2y agoHow about a simple username and password? Not everyone likes to connect all the things.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoGood suggestion. I will consider adding it to the login options.
- kevinios 2y agoCongrats! Little suggestion if I may, don't use the location of the user to set the default language of the website. Everything on my computer is in English, but your website defaulted to Spanish, as I'm currently in Spain. Am no expert, but a short article I just found on the topic: https://dev.to/bitdweller/stop-setting-the-language-of-your-website-based-on-my-location-31h0 https://dev.to/bitdweller/stop-setting-the-language-of-your-...
- Digikid13 2y agoI'm in Washington, USA and it's showing spanish. That's just the default and they don't even use location to set it.
- amy-petrik-214 2y agoAbout 20% of documented residents of washington speak spanish, and up to 52% including bilingual, documented, and undocumented. Thus it is the majority language.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoHaha, yes, that's how it is for now. In the future, I will recommend the language based on the browser settings.
- z3dd 2y agoit's just in Spanish and not dependent on location
- Brajeshwar 2y agoIn India and Spanish for me too. However, I can select English from the selection dropdown above. Anyways, why is that even the Big Tech does this! For instance, Google Maps will default to Dutch (which in the land of the Dutch) while my OS, the browser and everything else is in English. I found no option to say “English” and be done with it. I can translate but that isn't the correct way to it.
- 2y ago
- cranium 2y agoJust a word of caution: all these enhancement tools are making an informed guess to create each new pixel. The original information was lost and no one can't retrieve it, whether it's shape or color. (I've heard technical people claim otherwise.)
- worksonmine 2y agoYou seem to be very generous in your use of the term "technical".
- xiconfjs 2y agoNot as good yet (at least in this case): * original: https://upcdn.io/12a1z2u/image/uploads/2024/07/18/4kU68cBDKF-giphy.png https://upcdn.io/12a1z2u/image/uploads/2024/07/18/4kU68cBDKF... * "10K" enhanced: https://replicate.delivery/czjl/gFpKKIlEKKZrL1lfqxXlpQrOBbe9r6GXw4buHcsN4THoztJTA/output.png https://replicate.delivery/czjl/gFpKKIlEKKZrL1lfqxXlpQrOBbe9...
- ziml77 2y agoIt somehow manages to be smoothed over and blocky at the same time
- nicd 2y agoThis image may not be a representative test case. It looks like it has heavy compression (including posterization), and overall poor quality. "Quality" meaning things like focus, contrast, and low noise- separate from resolution.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoAnother point is that by default, we don't apply special processing to faces. However, enabling the face enhancement option will greatly improve the quality of photo images.
- pen2l 2y agoThe original contains artifacts that tend to arise after compression, as the other poster notes (posterization and such). I wonder if you'll get better results if you make the original go through a gaussian to smooth those artifacts, and then feed it to the enhancer.
- laurentlb 2y agoIf I understand correctly, there are 5 free credits (= 5 images) when I create an account. Do you plan to offer more free credits over time? Or have a plan that doesn't require a subscription? The product looks very nice, but I'm not willing to get a monthly subscription for this (I could pay, but I have very occasional needs).
- yangxiaobo 2y agoGreat suggestion! I plan to add an option to purchase credits separately, which can be used indefinitely once bought. I'll release this feature as soon as it's developed.
- virtualritz 2y agoTried it with some typical event photos of people that contain out-of-focus regions. Did a pretty terrible job. I.e. at 10k, you should see some skin structure but instead it was just color banding, eyelids had non-existing wrinkles added though etc. To the author: PM me and I send you some examples, if interested.
- Jaxan 2y agoSkin texture is very hard it seems. I’m often developing raw photos and the noise reduction often remove skin texture too much. Especially when I was editing photos of our newborn, there is just so much little details that easily gets lost in noise reduction (or compression) that are very clearly visible to the eye.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoMost enhancements involve noise reduction, which can indeed lead to some texture loss.
- bennyp101 2y agoLooks cool, but what do you do with the image once uploaded? The FAQ says "Yes, we take security very seriously and ensure that all images uploaded to our platform are protected. Enhancing image quality is safe and reliable." and the Privacy policy looks very generic and not specific to your service. Are the images deleted after x days? Do you keep to train again? What rights (if any) are you claiming once I use it?
- yangxiaobo 2y agoWe do not use uploaded images for training, nor do we share them with any third parties. We also regularly delete uploaded images, so you can rest assured your data is safe.
- kraken20480 2y agoI experimented with several images featuring people and pets. The processed results were so similar to the originals that it was difficult to discern any changes.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoYour original image might already be quite clear, so a simple comparison makes it hard to notice differences. I've tested with some clear images, and the differences become more apparent when carefully compared.
- itishappy 2y ago10x res is a lot. Do you do it in a single shot, or do you use multiple smaller steps (e.g. hitting it with 2 4x enhancements for 16x the res)? Also: 12000 pixels is a 110 x 110 image. 12000 x 12000 would be 144 megapixels.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoWe completed it all at once.
- xyzzy4747 2y agoLet me guess, it is just a Stable Diffusion wrapper?
- yangxiaobo 2y agoHaha, unfortunately, you guessed wrong—it’s not Stable Diffusion.
- jackblemming 2y agoLooks great. Nice job, thanks for making this.
- yangxiaobo 2y agothanks
- can16358p 2y agoHaven't tried yet but on a side note: why is the website opening Spanish by default instead of English?
- jaysonelliot 2y agoProbably because it's a Spanish website?
- yangxiaobo 2y agoHaha, yes, I originally planned to create a Spanish-language website.
- fumeux_fume 2y agoI work with small details from large images so I need something that will enhance the to a nice, sharp final resolution when I need to enlarge it. This tool worked very well with the samples I provided it. Great job!
- yangxiaobo 2y agoGlad to hear it's helpful to you!
- pavel_lishin 2y agoAfter submitting an image, I'm prompted to authenticate with Google - but once I do, and return, I have to re-submit the image. Also, it does ... not do great with faces, but I also did not expect it to: https://imgur.com/a/GCLbMGp https://imgur.com/a/GCLbMGp
- Sohcahtoa82 2y agoWow...it made everything worse.
- yangxiaobo 2y agoGreat suggestion! I’ve noted this issue and will work on improving the interaction. For faces, enabling the "Enhance Portrait" option will yield better results. However, the effect on your image isn't very noticeable even with the option enabled. I've tested other faces and observed a significant improvement with the option turned on. I'm currently unsure where the difference might be.