Upscale artwork for printing without it going soft

Why Image Size in Photoshop cannot fix this

Resampling interpolates: it decides what colour belongs between two pixels by averaging its neighbours. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic invents no information — you get a larger file containing exactly as much detail as the small one had, spread thinner. A trained model is doing something different. It has seen enough real photographs to reconstruct what the missing detail probably looked like — measured here on a 500px landscape blown up four times, individual conifers, scree and shoreline come back where bicubic gives green mush.

What 300 dpi actually asks of you

The working rule is 300 dpi at final print size, which is a statement about pixels, not about a number stored in the file. An eleven-inch print wants roughly 3,300 pixels across. Changing a JPG from 72 to 300 dpi in an export dialog changes metadata and nothing else — the pixels are identical and the print is identically soft. The only two honest fixes are a bigger original or a genuine reconstruction.

Where it runs, stated plainly

This one is a server tool, and it is worth being exact about that because the rest of the editor is not. Background removal, colour separation, the brush and lasso tools and every export run inside your browser and never transmit anything. The upscaler cannot: the model runs on Cloudflare’s network, so the picture is uploaded, upscaled, and the source deleted as soon as the result comes back. Nothing is used to train anything.

The limits, before you spend time on it

Signed out you get two a day at up to 4 megapixels out. A free account — no card — gives three a day at up to 8 megapixels, which is 3264×2448, enough for an eleven-inch print at 300 dpi. Past that it costs one credit, and signing up grants a batch of them. Nothing is watermarked at any tier, and nothing is quality-reduced: the free tier caps how many, never how good.

Where it helps, and where it honestly will not

Photographs are where this genuinely shines. Landscape, product and lifestyle shots gain real texture — foliage, fabric, stone — because the model has seen enough of them to reconstruct plausibly. Type and precise letterforms are the honest hard case, and not in the way you would expect: the edges come back sharper than bicubic, but the shapes themselves drift. We upscaled anti-aliased type four times and the capital A came back with a skewed apex and an uneven crossbar — crisper, and the wrong shape. For a customer logo that has to be exact, that is a defect, not a rescue. Set type from the font instead, or ask for the vector. And a picture that was blurry, JPEG-mangled or badly lit to begin with comes back as a larger version of those problems: this fixes the wrong size, never the wrong quality.