Model AI Upscalers

Model

Upscaling AI images: ESRGAN models, hires-fix, tiled diffusion and when each one is right

The three families of upscaling and what they are for: fast pixel upscalers (4x-UltraSharp, Real-ESRGAN, SwinIR, DAT) for clean enlargement, hires-fix for adding detail at generation time, and tiled diffusion (Ultimate SD Upscale, SUPIR, Flux-based) for turning a 1024 render into a detailed 4K print; with denoise values, tile sizes and the models worth downloading.

Model

Checkpoint vs LoRA vs embedding vs ControlNet: which file does what

The six kinds of model files you will meet, what each one changes, how big it is, where it goes and when to use it: checkpoints and fine-tunes, LoRAs and their LyCORIS cousins, textual inversion embeddings, ControlNets and IP-Adapters, VAEs and upscalers.

Model

Which AI image models to try first, and why: a ranked starting list

Seven models for a first week, chosen for forgiveness rather than hype: one SDXL photo fine-tune, one anime fine-tune, Flux dev, a fast turbo model, an inpainting model, a video model and an upscaler, each with the reason, the memory it needs and the prompt style it expects.