Below, you see a 4K+ upscale done with a new upscaling model in Open Creative Studio:

This is the comparison with the original image:

Now, let me tell you why this is a bigger deal than it seems.

Until a couple of weeks ago, the undisputed king of upscaling was a model called SUPIR. Unfortunately, SUPIR is exceptionally hard to configure and very slow. Most people don’t have the patience or the resources to test and tweak it.

To mitigate this issue, Open Creative Studio always ships with a pre-configured SUPIR node optimized for 3 different use cases. But even then, there are plenty of edge cases where SUPIR requires extra effort to work well.

The new upscaling model you see in action in this example, instead, is blazing fast. It’s capable of upscaling an image to 4K in under 1 minute with an RTX 6000 ADA. SUPIR would take 25min 😱
And it’s one one-click button. No complex parameters to tweak.

But it’s not why this is a big deal.

This new upscaling model is also phenomenally detailed. Way better than the best SUPIR configuration. And it doesn’t introduce any variation from the source image (what we fancifully call “creative upscaling”).

But it’s not why this is a big deal.

This new upscaling model is also available for free to download and use under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. SUPIR, instead, requires negotiating an ad-hoc license for commercial use with its creators.

But it’s not why this is a big deal.

The big deal is this:

Not even SUPIR could handle a specific type of source images: those with intricate patterns. This is why, to test upscaling models, I selected this particular frame of Batman v Superman over 2 years ago.

To upscale an image like that, you still needed a much older upscaling model called CCSR.

CCSR is faster and easier to use than SUPIR, but it’s worse in almost every scenario except for intricate pattern upscaling. This is why, for many releases, Open Creative Studio included both SUPIR and CCSR.

It won’t be necessary anymore.

As you can see from the picture, this new model excels at upscaling images with intricate patterns, far surpassing CCSR performance, and the performance of very expensive commercial upscalers.
It delivered the best Superman 4K I’ve seen since I started working with ComfyUI, 2.5 years ago.

This new upscaling model is already supported by Open Creative Studio 13.0, which is free and available now for download.

In version 13.0, it is configured to exclusively upscale videos. In the upcoming version 14.0, it will replace CCSR for image upscaling, too.

Very impressive progress in just 1 year!