Azteca wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 7:38 pm
Hey folks, though you clearly have some very advanced and specific workflows, I thought I would share this tool.
GUI for ESRGAN with waifu2x prefiltering and model blending.
We have some experts on these forums by now, but it might be a good way for the less technical to dip their toes in.
That's very interesting, thanks for sharing!
MasonFace wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2019 12:12 am
Thank you for sharing this! I'm glad someone finally took the effort to compile a GUI for all that stuff. It would be really interesting to see MrFlibble's pre-processing methods (and maybe even a noise generator too) incorporated into this program.
Agreed, at least it would be nice to know what other people think of them. (But the tool like this would also help optimise the tedious multipass pre-processing routine).
@King of Worms, since you're already registered at that forum, would you mind telling the
satsuki about the xBRZ preprocessing method. I just threw together a small comparison with the same sprite from DF scaled up using one, two and three passes:
https://imgur.com/a/foJnH31
(it also seems that three xBRZ passes are actually better than one xBR plus two xBRZ passes)
The description of the process is
here, I also think that you can use Bicubic for scaling down instead of Sinc if Gaussian blur is applied at 1.5 pixel radius (i.e. Gaussian @ 1 + Sinc = Gaussian @ 1.5 + Bicubic).
But that's not all! While I did not intend to use the ESRganResizer tool, I noticed that the screenshot mentioned a model I was not aware of, so I downloaded it to check out what's inside. Two new models, so I decided to Google for more and found this:
https://esrgan.blogspot.com/2019/01/blog-post.html
Someone took the trouble of training a lot of models intended to upscale 8-bit video game graphics (although none of them were trained on data sets made from video game graphics). The results are rather impressive -- the cartoonpainted model for example can decently handle sprite edges without any preprocessing at all (still not perfect though):
cartoonpainted_80000
cartoonpainted_5000
The 80000 actually produced very decent faces for the NPCs -- looking much better than anything we got with Manga109 or its interpolations.
UPD: I interpolated cartoonpainted_80000 with PSNR at alpha 0.8 and ran some of the test sprites through it with a single xBRZ pass and no prior sharpening (original image - scale w/ xBRZ -> Gaussian blur 1 pixel radius -> scale down to original size with Sinc). Results:
https://imgur.com/a/WH1AFpM
