Upscayl tutorial: setup, model comparison and 16x upscale

In this French tutorial, Alain from Alpa14 walks through Upscayl's desktop installation on Windows, then compares models on a landscape, faces and a small logo. He describes the desktop app as free and open source for Windows, macOS and Linux, with local processing and offline use after installation. He distinguishes it from Upscayl Cloud, a separate hosted service.

The tutorial covers language and theme settings, image import, batch processing and output folders. Export choices include PNG, JPG and WebP. Alain explains that AI upscaling invents missing detail rather than recovering an exact original. He also points out model-specific commercial-use restrictions, identifying Remacri and Ultra Mix as noncommercial options.

The landscape example grows from 640 × 425 to 2560 × 1700 with Standard. For faces, Alain finds Lite faster but overly smooth, and prefers High Fidelity for skin detail. Digital Art enlarges his 150 × 150 logo to 600 × 600; a separate Standard run with Double Upscayl reaches 2400 × 2400 in nearly two minutes.

His reported setup is an Intel Core i7 laptop with 16 GB RAM and no dedicated graphics card. Those timings describe his machine while recording the screen. He recommends 4x for photos and warns that 16x can produce excessive smoothing on images with subtle tonal variation.