AI Image Enhancer 2026: Upscale, Sharpen and Restore Photos With Real-ESRGAN

Old photos are blurry, screenshots are tiny, and upscaling tools cost money. The open source enhancer stack fixes all three - locally and free.

💡 What You Will Learn

Old photos are blurry, screenshots are tiny, and upscaling tools cost money. The open source enhancer stack fixes all three - locally and free.

📜 Table of Contents

• What Image Enhancement Actually Does
• The Tools
• The Workflow That Works
• The Honest Limits
• Batch Mode

What Image Enhancement Actually Does

AI image enhancement has three distinct jobs that people routinely confuse: upscaling (making a small image larger), restoration (fixing blur, noise, compression artifacts), and face enhancement (rebuilding faces). Different models do different jobs - the right tool per task is the whole game.

The Tools

• Real-ESRGAN (36,433 stars) - the default for upscaling and general enhancement. It super-resolves images 2-4x while cleaning up JPEG artifacts. Works on photos, anime, and documents. One command line; a 4x upscale of a 1MP photo takes seconds on GPU, ~30-60s on CPU.
• CodeFormer (18,102 stars) - the face specialist. Fixes blurry, low-res, or AI-degraded faces - the classic old-family-photo tool. Works standalone or as a Real-ESRGAN companion step.
• GFPGAN - another face-restoration model, often used together with Real-ESRGAN for the face region.
• ComfyUI (125,304 stars) - when you need to chain upscale + face fix + denoise into a repeatable workflow, ComfyUI makes it one click.

The Workflow That Works

1. Upscale first with Real-ESRGAN (2x or 4x).
2. Fix the face with CodeFormer at low strength (0.3-0.5) - full strength gives the plastic look.
3. Light denoise if needed; don't over-sharpen or you get halos.
4. Compare against the original at 100% zoom. Enhancement is done when it looks natural, not when it looks processed.

The Honest Limits

Enhancement cannot invent detail that was never captured. A 100x100 pixel face will be reconstructed (guessed), not recovered - it will look plausible but not identical to the real person. For documents, Real-ESRGAN is excellent; for text-heavy images use the specific text model variants. And never use face enhancement on someone's photo without their knowledge - reconstructed faces can mislead.

Batch Mode

Both Real-ESRGAN and CodeFormer support batch processing of folders. For 100 old photos, set it running and come back in an hour - that is the practical difference between a tool and a toy.