What would you upscale today?

Issue #8 Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger + Upscalers

Author

AI for Creatives
December 01, 2023

Boost your AI energies & knowledge. A “weekly” digest with news on the AI field. With focus on Creativity: Design, Art, Tech & everything between. In your inbox every Monday now & then.

Hi, fellow creatives! Welcome to our issue #8

In the same way, things have been moving faster in the AI space. Things are getting bigger. The trend seems to have gone into superlative mode in the AI field. An increased number of applications was created. A larger computing capacity is needed. Bigger data center storage. Escalated energy power is needed. Today: how to upscale your static images. Are you looking for more resolution & increased quality for your designs?

“There will be more AI assistants than people in this world. Forecasts indicate that there will be 8.4 billion AI-powered digital voice assistant units in the world by 2024, which surpasses the total global population”

Upscaled AI fact from Simplilearn

Top 3 AI Tools

We have now 529 tools in our repository focusing on Creative tooling. Since the last time you read this, we added 0 more tools.

Krea.ai

Fresh from the oven! Krea.ai released a new image “upscale & enhance” functionality. A new tool within the Krea suite. Insert patterns into images like in this example. Enlarge images up to 3.2x. It includes a UI to add prompts, negative prompting & their strength to enhance & tweak the image.

Here below we played with different values for AI Strength & negative prompts. Be aware that giving too much creative freedom to the model adds unwanted additions to your image! Is ok if you use that for creative purposes & is a conscious decision!

Krea is on a waitlist… With this invite code you can skip it: KREA-FRIENDS

Topaz Photo AI

Topaz Photo AI. A model trained specifically for camera pictures & favourite by many pros like. So sharp, it integrates within your Lightroom & Photoshop workflows so you don’t need to switch tools. No subscriptions are needed. Get a pay-only-once license as in the good old days! Plus, the model is downloaded to your laptop so your images are not uploaded to any cloud and you keep control of your images. If you are looking to make your videos sharper, you also have Topaz Video AI.

Bigjpg

If you are tight on budget or want to limit your monthly subscription spend. Bigjpg is an image enlarger with a generous free version. It lets you upscale up to 4x your images on the free version. Going up to 8x and 16x in the upgrade one ($6 subscription for 2 months).

It offers also a noise reduction option for your images. While we were doing tests we did not see major improvements in quality apart from properly enlarging the image you can see in the image below.

Bigjpg is available in their web version. Available as an app in these systems: Windows (32-bit / 64-bit), Mac, iOS and Android. If you are into development, access their API to enlarge images through code.

Upscaling cocktail dreams…

6 AI topics to share with your pals

  1. Funny & creative: More and more, bigger & bigger. Some samples here why does everything end in the space? Upscaling the fun!

  2. Runway GEN-2 got a major update on text-to-video and image-to-video generations. Upscaled improvements with motion, movement, & video output.

  3. Have you tried the new tune command in MidJourney? MJ generates a large number of style variations that you can pick to fine-tune the model. Then you can apply a style that you like in future generations. Check the one we created for this edition’s meme.

  4. Pika Labs released Pika 1.0 with new functionality to create text-to-video. Create videos from scratch. They keep on doing what they are best at, to make your images move. Control over camera movement, motion, & speed – AI video space escaled!

  5. Shaky times for Stable Diffusion? Stability AI CEO explored selling their business due to investor concerns over its financial position.

  6. Upscaled business OpenAI drama anyone? This is old news. Some highlights:

    1. It all started with this announcement… OpenAI launched an API that lets developers build ‘assistants’ into their apps.

    2. This escalated quickly when Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO was fired by the board. He is back now and we saw many things in the fastest weekend AI news soap opera type of drama

    3. A bit of fun? + Satya Nadella (Microsoft’s CEO) on how to tweet and lead through crisis + Have you seen Elon’s Musk answer to the tweet?

    4. Even a Steve Jobs reflection on the topic

    5. New interim Open AI CEO, coming from Twitch to the rescue?

    6. After a near mutiny from OpenAI’s team

    7. Sam Altman is back. Keep moving, nothing happened here!

     

…and this's a wrap on this weekly edition of our AI-powered today with an upscaled view newsletter!

Anything you would like to see more of? Let us know, what you want to read about next week. A specific tool? We love to meet inspiring creatives & better humans to create together even better worlds!

Remember: not bigger means better, but in images and video resolution it helps!

❤️ Keep upscaling creating, keep innovating, and keep on being dope!

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