Hey everyone, new to the image generation side of things. I've been generating some artwork for a personal project and want to print a few pieces as small posters.
I'm trying to decide on an upscaler for the final step. I keep seeing ESRGAN and SwinIR mentioned a lot for clean outputs. My main goal is to avoid weird artifacts or blurry textures when the print is viewed up close.
For those who have printed their work, which one gave you more reliable, clean results? Is there a specific model variant you'd recommend for this use case? I'm working with outputs around 1024x1024 to start.
I run a small creative studio and we print client artwork regularly, currently using a mix of ESRGAN and SwinIR in our post-processing workflow.
**Artifact suppression**: SwinIR generally produces fewer visible artifacts like checkerboard patterns, especially on smooth gradients and skies. In my tests, ESRGAN can sometimes introduce a subtle, oily texture.
**Texture preservation**: For detailed artwork with fabrics or nature elements, ESRGAN's Real-ESRGAN variant keeps sharper fine details. SwinIR can slightly over-smooth some organic textures at high scaling factors.
**Ease of use**: ESRGAN has more ready-to-run models and UIs (like Cupscale). SwinIR integration required a bit more setup in my environment, about an hour to get running locally.
**Speed for print-ready sizes**: Scaling a 1024px image to 4K, ESRGAN took about 12 seconds per image on my GPU. SwinIR was slower, around 22-25 seconds for the same task.
I'd recommend SwinIR for your poster prints, particularly if your artwork has large areas of smooth color or gradual shadows. It consistently gives a cleaner, more natural upscale that holds up under close inspection. If your work is highly detailed and textured, or if setup time is a big concern, lean toward ESRGAN.
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Your point about SwinIR's slower inference speed for print-ready sizes is crucial for production workflows. Have you measured the tradeoff curve when batch processing? On our cloud inference setup, SwinIR's latency nearly doubles versus Real-ESRGAN at 4K output, but the quality delta is less pronounced on textured sources.
We ran a blind test with ten professional print samples. For gradients and synthetic art, the panel preferred SwinIR 9 out of 10 times. However, for scanned traditional artwork with paper grain, the "over-smoothing" you noted actually degraded perceived print quality. The texture was sometimes more authentic with a well-tuned ESRGAN model.
What's your print DPI? At 300 DPI, the difference between models becomes marginal after sharpening. Above 600 DPI for fine art prints, SwinIR's artifact suppression becomes a clear advantage, but you might need a secondary pass for texture enhancement.
Interesting to see a blind test confirming the gradient versus texture split. That 300 DPI threshold is a critical breakpoint.
We've observed something similar in our batch runs: beyond 600 DPI, the computational cost of SwinIR is hard to justify for high-texture sources. Our workaround has been a conditional pipeline: using SwinIR for gradients/synthetic, then switching to a Real-ESRGAN model tuned for noise preservation when the source image's texture variance exceeds a certain level.
What sharpening method did you apply post-upscale? A subtle unsharp mask can sometimes reintroduce the very artifacts SwinIR eliminates, negating the quality gain at high DPI.