Midjourney Upscaler: How Well Does It Work?

In this newsletter, read about:

• 🕵️‍♀️ Midjourney Upscaler

• 🗞 News and Top Reads

• 📌 AI Art Tutorial: A Comprehensive Comparison of AI Image Generators

• 🎨 Featured Artist: Marius Troy

• 🖼 AI-Assisted Artwork of the Week

• 🤓 A Comprehensive Midjourney Guide

🕵️‍♀️ Midjourney Upscaler

As many of you probably already heard, Midjourney dropped a new feature that lets you upscale Midjourney-generated images by 2x or 4x. After you choose an image from the grid of 4 images by clicking one of U1/U2/U3/U4, you'll see two new buttons under the image: "Upscale (2x)" and "Upscale (4x)". Click one of them to increase the resolution of your image by 2 or 4 times, respectively.

A few things to know before using this upscaler:

• Upscaling image will cost you lots of GPU minutes with 4x upscaler costing roughly 3x more GPU minutes than the 2x upscaler. Later in this post, I’ll provide the exact numbers based on my own experiments.

• You may use an upscaler on your earlier generated images by entering the command /show job_id.

• A blurry low-resolution image will not be 'unblurred' by upscale.

Now let’s run an experiment.

Upscaling Experiment

To test a new upscaler, I’ve selected an image that has lots of small details so that we can better see the difference between the initial and upscaled images.

The image looks great, but zooming in reveals that the jewelry lacks detail and sharpness due to the low resolution. Let's see how the new upscaler handles this challenge.

I upscaled the image with both "Upscale (2x)" and "Upscale (4x)", zoomed in on the same section of the necklace, and placed the resulting images side-by-side for easier comparison.

The results are a bit surprising. The 2x upscaler did a great job, adding details and making the necklace look sharper, less pixelated, and more realistic. But the 4x upscaler produced an image that doesn't look like a necklace at all. This may be because the 4x upscaler had too many pixels to fill in and tried to create new tiny patterns within the image, losing the overall image in the process.

I tried twice to upscale the image with the 4x upscaler, and the result was about the same. For this particular image, the 2x upscaler was the better option, but I think the outcome is case-dependent, and other images might be better suited for 4x upscaling. To determine the best option, you'll need to experiment, but cautiously, as it can be expensive. Let's take a closer look at some numbers.

Stats Behind the Midjourney Upscaler

Admittedly, I haven't had much time to experiment with the new upscaler, but I believe the following numbers from my limited experiments can still help you understand its performance and costs:

Please see here the comparison of the original image, and the 2x and 4x upscales in their actual size.

Finally, note that 4x upscaled images can be very large (20-30 MB). They cannot be saved as PNG files directly in Discord and will be downloaded as WEBP files. To save a 4x upscaled image as a PNG, click "Web" under the image to open it in the Midjourney web app, and then save it from there. But from my experience, it sometimes takes several hours for the upscaled images to be available for review and download in the Midjourney web app.

Happy prompting!

🗞 News and Top Reads

• Midjourney is testing the phase 1 update to their website.

  • This first release is focused on searching, browsing, and viewing images.

  • Organization features (such as collections) and image creation features will be included in follow-up releases.

  • Try it out at https://beta.midjourney.com/. If it works well, this new site will soon replace the current one.

• Starting from last week, Midjourney is also available in its own mobile app…sort of.

  • Midjourney partnered with engineers from Japanese game company Sizigi Studios to launch Niji Journey, an Android and iOS app.

  • Even though it’s focused on images in Midjourney’s anime art style, also known as “Niji,” you may also generate standard images in this app by selecting v5 in the settings.

• YouTube Music now lets users change up their playlist cover art by prompting a text-to-image AI.

📌 AI Art Tutorial: A Comprehensive Comparison of AI Image Generators

In this great video, Matt compares major AI image generators (Midjourney, DALL-E 3, SDXL, Firefly, Google, and Ideogram) across a variety of criteria to help you identify the best one for your use case. Check out the video to see, which AI image generators are best at realism, illustration, logos, text in images, and backgrounds.

🎨 Featured Artist: Marius Troy

Marius Troy is a Norwegian multi-disciplinary artist utilizing new media crafting visions and immersive experiences. He uses Midjourney to reimagine humans, nature, architecture, or create new imaginary objects. Check out Marius’s artwork on Instagram.

🖼 AI-Assisted Artwork of the Week

🤓 A Comprehensive Midjourney Guide

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