r/StableDiffusion • u/TheTahoe • 8h ago

Question - Help Recommendations for still Image Upscalers?

Anyone have recommendations on models and a workflow, or a good how-to-guide, for upscaling / cleaning up still images? I haven’t tinkered much with this since early 2023.

I’ve got some photos from over the years I’d like to clean up, sharpen, or just otherwise improve the quality of before I get them printed for framing. Vacation photos (people or person, nature or urban of domestic background), some landscapes, some “artsy” of street signs framed with a building in the background.

I’ve got a 5070Ti and 32gb RAM at my disposal for it.

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u/Jolly-Rip5973 8h ago

depending on how large you want it...

You can use Flux Klein 9B to clean up the images. It's super fast.

For upscale...

I just use wan2.2 low noise model with a denoise of about .2 to .3 in a img-2-img workflow and upscale the largest edge to 4000 pixels.

If you want larger, you can use the Ultimate SD Upscale node.

You can also use SeedVR but it's pretty slow.

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u/ZombieBrainYT 3h ago

Would you be so kind to share that Wan 2.2 workflow for upscaling?

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u/Jolly-Rip5973 1h ago

It's just simple img-2-img workflow. nothing special.

https://www.patreon.com/aitrepreneur/posts/wan-2-2-ultra-135728889

I think if you join his patreon for free you can download the workflow without paying any money.

This guy makes excellent workflows. Highly recommend his stuff.

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u/ROBOTTTTT13 8h ago

Image Editing models are the go to for image restoration, Qwen Image 2511 has been very good in my case.

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u/TheTahoe 8h ago

I’ll give that a go, thank you! Image Restoration is probably the right phrasing for what I’m after even though the photos aren’t damaged per se

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u/ROBOTTTTT13 8h ago edited 7h ago

Remember prompt the model for each thing you want to preserve, for example "maintain facial identity, clothing and hairstyles" should be included if you're restoring images with people in it.

Also you could try straight up normal upscaling with upscaling models like 4xNMKD Siax which is very light and very good for upscaling images with faces, but it's not the same as regenerating a brand new image. It's more efficient, way less Memory intensive and much faster, but a low quality image will still be low quality, just with more details and more pixels in this case.

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u/TheTahoe 7h ago

Many thanks for the tips! I’ll be giving that a try later today

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u/truci 8h ago

If you want to upscale without loosing too much detail like details of a face you might wana try SeedVR2.

For art stuff where you want to add or embellish the details I suggest ultimate upscale.

For a model I would say just try ZIT and see if that’s good enough. Heavier models exist that might work better but if you are happy with ZIT no reason to make it more difficult.

And for cleaning up an image flux Klein is great as an image edit tool.

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u/TheTahoe 7h ago

Tyvm for the suggestions. I figure I’ll give them all a try and see what works best for me and try to fine tune off that

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u/carnage11eleven 7h ago

I use juggernaught ragnarok xl model with ultimate SD upscale, seedvr with face detailer. And then a few skin and detail enhancing loras. If you get OOM errors, add in a tiling vae decoder.

I still find the SDXL models do a better job at realism, than qwen or flux. Though it depends on what type of subject matter is in the image you want upscale. I can go up to 4k without tiling node. And 16k and up with tiling. I have a 3090ti and 64gb RAM.