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PSA: That free AI upscaler I called garbage actually saved my client's 2007 logo files
I told a buddy in Austin that AI upscalers were garbage after one turned my 300dpi ink sketches into mush back in March. Then a client handed me 12 logo files from 2007, all locked at 480x480, and I had nothing to lose. I ran them through that same tool at 4x, tweaked the settings, and the vector traces came out clean enough that the client printed them on 6 foot banners. I still check every export by hand, and it fails on anything with real texture, but for flat old logos it is doing in 20 minutes what took me 2 hours. Has anyone found a setting that keeps gradients from going all banded?
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chen.jade12d ago
The thing most people miss with banding is that it usually starts in the source file, not the upscaler, so no setting will fully fix a gradient that was already crushed at 480px with heavy jpg compression. Try adding a tiny bit of noise or grain before you upscale, since the tool has actual pixel data to blend instead of guessing between two flat bands. It sounds backwards but it works way better than any smoothing slider you'll find.
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