Topaz Gigapixel
Topaz Labs · Image-Enhance
Industry-standard desktop application for photo upscaling and restoration. The default tool for archival work, photo restoration, and print-sized enlargements where fidelity to the original matters.
Proprietary Runs locally Mac · 16 GB+
Try on: Topaz Labs
Released Sep 2025 · Verified 2026-09-08
SeedVR2
ByteDance · Image-Enhance
ByteDance Seed's open restoration and upscaling model for video and still images. Restores and upscales in a single diffusion step, so it is far faster than multi-step diffusion upscalers while adding more real detail than older GAN upscalers.
Apache 2.0 Open Runs locally Mac (slow) · 16 GB+
Try on: Hugging Face (3B) · Hugging Face (7B) · ComfyUI-SeedVR2_VideoUpscaler
Released Jun 2025 · Verified 2026-10-28
BiRefNet
Nankai University · Image-Enhance
A high-quality open background-removal and cut-out model from Peng Zheng and co-authors (lead affiliation Nankai University). Separates the subject from the background with clean edges on hair and fine detail; a high-resolution variant works at 2048×2048.
MIT Open Runs locally Mac (slow) · 8 GB+
Try on: Hugging Face · rembg · Hugging Face Spaces
Released Jan 2024 · Verified 2026-10-28
Stable Diffusion x4 Upscaler
Stability AI · Image-Enhance
Stability AI's diffusion-based 4× upscaler. Trades speed for quality — invents plausible high-frequency detail rather than just sharpening, which suits AI-generated images especially well.
CreativeML Open RAIL++-M Open weights Runs locally Mac (slow) · 16 GB+
Try on: Hugging Face · ComfyUI · Replicate
Released Dec 2022 · Verified 2026-09-08
Real-ESRGAN
Tencent ARC Lab · Image-Enhance
The de-facto open-weights image upscaler. Battle-tested across years of community use; runs on CPU or GPU, integrates with virtually every local image pipeline.
BSD-3-Clause Open Runs locally Mac · 8 GB+
Try on: GitHub · Hugging Face · Replicate
Released Jul 2021 · Verified 2026-10-28
