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.

## 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.