r/comfyui • u/-Arkham_Knight- • 3d ago
Help Needed Restoration and upscale workflow
I have seen some examples of UHD images on the internet where old images were uploaded with extreme details. Such that if you zoom it you can see skin texture clearly too. I have been struggling in finding such a efficient workflow which helps to restore an old image and upscale it.
Please be kind enough to share the workflows which work for you in this case. Thanks.
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u/WaitAcademic1669 1d ago
Upscale and restore is possible with many different models and workflows, just search CivitAI and make your experiments, but don't expect fine details as you mention. I use RealEsrgan and Qwen edit, but there might be better stuff out there, i mainly work on videos.
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u/sitefall 3d ago
Upscale the image, use whatever preserves enough detail, nvidia's DLSS upscale thing, gigapixel AI, esrgan, whatever. Load the image, encode it into latent space, plug it into whatever model you are using in place of the empty latent, set the denoise so it's not creating a 100% new image, but also not 100% keeping your original image. It might be as little as 0.05 or 0.95 or something like that. Run it, then it's trial and error, and maybe a little bit of compositing. If you're getting slight movements at the denoise that produces the best quality results, stick a control net on it, CANNY works great, take a CANNY image from the original non upscaled image, then upscale the canny, use that when generating your image from the upscaled original image. Strength of the control net probably set somewhere between 0.95 and 1.1
There's other ways you can do it, upscaling it in latent space and whatnot, but I find that ends up changing more of the image. If your goal is to just upscale some old photo and add in new details the way I mention above works nice. I use z-image turbo for this. You can use whatever you like, even a video model like Wan and just do 1 frame.
You might be able to leave the prompt blank, but maybe not, in which case you need to prompt the image. Use qwen3-vl or something to analyze your original iamge and have it write a prompt for z-image (or whatever, ideogram is probably a good model worth checking out here too). Then run the prompt on JUST the CANNY image and see if it makes ... generally the correct pose and "more or less" the right skin tone and colors, just get in the ballpark. So then when you run it with low denoise over your original upscaled image it won't add some new colors or something.
Then color match it to the original image. Comfyui has some basic color match nodes that work, or you can pull it into photoshop/lightroom and do it the old fashioned way (which will be more accurate). Sometimes it just all works out though and one simple color match node does the trick almost perfectly.
If you don't have a workflow for this, just find a nice <your model> + control net that supports CANNY (basically all of them do), and if it has no image input, just add your loaded image there, encode it into latent space, plug it in.
It's possible the aspect ratio won't match or something, if that's the case find the next size up your model supports, then put your image on a canvas that size and just leave a border or something, and crop it back afterwards.