October 6, 2026
The best AI image upscalers in 2026: prices, limits and which one to pick
Topaz Gigapixel, Magnific, Krea, Upscayl, Let's Enhance, Clarity, Photoshop, Leonardo and Imaginode compared on what matters: faithful or creative, maximum size, real price per image, free version. Prices taken from official pages on 6 October 2026.
Frank HoubreFounder of Imaginode
A market where half the tools run the same engine
Topaz runs its models inside Photoshop, Krea, Magnific Premium+, Runway and Imaginode: before comparing brands, compare models, then the way each tool charges for them.
Search for "best AI upscaler" and you will mostly land on rankings written by the vendors themselves, who put themselves first. This comparison has a different rule: every price comes from the tool's official page, read on 6 October 2026, and what we say about quality comes from renders we produced ourselves, cropped at 100%.
The first finding while gathering the data: the "competitors" often share the same engine. Topaz Labs models run in Photoshop (Gigapixel and Bloom), in Krea, in Magnific's Premium+ plan, behind Runway's "Upscale to 4K", and on Imaginode. And on 25 June 2026 Adobe announced an agreement to acquire Topaz Labs, whose products remain sold on their own according to the announcement.
What really sets the tools apart comes down to three things: whether they upscale faithfully or reinvent the image, up to what size, and above all how they charge. A $29 monthly subscription makes no sense for upscaling ten images a year, and a per-image price makes none for ten thousand.
Faithful or creative: the question to ask before any other
A faithful upscaler rebuilds the sharp version of what exists; a creative upscaler regenerates texture and can change a face, an eye color, a piece of jewelry: on a real photo, creative is a mistake.
This is not about quality but about nature. Research formalized it back in 2018: an upscaler cannot be both as accurate as possible to the source and as sharp as possible to the eye. Tools settled the matter by offering two modes, each with its own names: Precision and Creative at Magnific, Precise and Creative at Leonardo and Adobe, Crisp and Creative at Recraft, Precision and Bloom at Topaz.
The two crops below show the difference on the same 360-pixel family photo upscaled four times. In faithful mode, the mother keeps her blue eyes and her drop earring. In creative mode, the image is sharper, the skin has gained freckles and wrinkles, the eyes have turned hazel, the drop earring has become a hoop, and the child's hair has darkened.
For an AI-generated image, an illustration or a landscape, these inventions are often welcome. For a photo of someone, they are a deal breaker. The full explanation, detail by detail, is in AI upscaling: faithful or creative.
Topaz Gigapixel: the desktop benchmark
Gigapixel costs $149 a year or $29 a month on its own, runs locally on your graphics card, upscales up to 6x and offers both faithful and generative models; Topaz now only sells subscriptions.
This is the tool photographers mention first, for good reasons. Gigapixel installs on your computer, processes images locally, which matters for confidential photos, and offers about ten models depending on the subject: Standard, High Fidelity, Low Res for very small images, Text & Shapes, Art & CG, Face Recovery for faces, and generative models, Redefine and Wonder, that add detail.
Prices read on topazlabs.com on 6 October 2026: Gigapixel alone, $149 a year or $29 a month. The Topaz Studio bundle, which groups Gigapixel, Photo and Video, costs $399 a year, with commercial use limited to businesses under one million in revenue; Studio Pro, $799 a year, lifts that limit. The web version, Topaz for Web Image, was $12 a month on promotion, $19 normally, with ten free renders without watermark to try it.
Its limits: you need a decent graphics card for local processing to be fast, export is capped at 32 megapixels on Studio and 100 on Studio Pro, and the perpetual license is gone. For someone upscaling hundreds of photos a month, it is the best choice. For a few images a year, the subscription pays off poorly. Our detailed comparison with the vendor is at Imaginode vs Topaz.
Magnific: the king of creative
Magnific, the former Freepik renamed on 28 April 2026, is the tool that popularized prompt-driven creative upscaling; its entry plan costs €16 a month, or €12 billed yearly, with no free version on the pricing page.
Magnific made its name with a creative upscaler you steer like a generator: a prompt, a creativity slider, a resemblance slider, an HDR setting. You can ask it to invent boldly, and on a generated image or an illustration it works wonders. Factors range from 2x to 16x. A Precision V2 mode has since been added for faithful upscaling.
The 2026 change is a big one: Freepik took the Magnific name on 28 April, and upscaling now draws from the same credit pool as image and video generation. The Premium plan costs €16 a month, €12 billed yearly, excluding tax (prices were shown to us in euros), and includes Magnific's image and video upscalers; Premium+, €36 a month, adds Topaz's upscalers. The pricing page lists 90 credits for a 2K image in Precision.
The downside is the entry price for occasional use and the lack of a free trial on the pricing page. And creative mode, by definition, is not meant for photos of real people. Our comparison sheet is at Imaginode vs Magnific.
Krea Enhancer: a self-service of models
Krea offers Topaz, Topaz Generative, Bloom and its own Krea Enhance in the same interface, up to 22K output on the Pro plan at $35 a month, with a free version limited to 2K.
Krea plays the aggregator: in its Enhancer, you pick the model the way you pick a brush. Krea Enhance up to 8K, Bloom up to 10K, Topaz up to 22K, Topaz Generative up to 16K, with sub-models for low resolutions, faces or computer-generated images.
The free plan gives 100 compute units a day and upscaling limited to 2K, enough to test. Pro costs $35 a month, $21 billed yearly, with 20,000 units and upscaling up to 22K. The unit cost of an upscale is not published, and the documentation warns that video eats through the budget quickly.
It is a very good choice if you already use Krea to generate. Just for upscaling, the subscription is expensive compared to paying per image.
Upscayl and Real-ESRGAN: free and local
Upscayl is free, open source software for Windows, macOS and Linux that runs Real-ESRGAN and its variants on your graphics card; its latest published release dates from 25 December 2024.
If the budget is zero, this is the answer. Upscayl installs on your computer, needs no account, and upscales with Real-ESRGAN, the reference open model, plus a few variants like Remacri or UltraSharp. You need a Vulkan-compatible graphics card, and many integrated chips are not enough.
Real-ESRGAN, published in 2021, was trained on artificially damaged images, blur, noise, JPEG compression, which makes it good at the common flaws of web photos. It is a fairly faithful upscaler that does not invent faces, but it can give a slightly painted look on skin and fine textures.
Two caveats. The project has not published a new release since December 2024, so its models are at 2024 level. And Upscayl now also sells an online offer, Upscayl Cloud, at $24.99 a month. The desktop software itself remains entirely free.
Let's Enhance and Clarity: the online specialists
Let's Enhance goes up to 512 megapixels from $9 a month billed yearly; Clarity bills its API per megapixel with no subscription, $0.016 in faithful Crystal mode and $0.005 in creative Clarity mode.
Let's Enhance is a long-standing online upscaler, fairly faithful, with very high ceilings: 256 megapixels on Starter, 350 on Pro, 512 on Max. Starter costs $12 a month, $9 billed yearly, for 100 credits, and unused credits roll over up to six times the monthly amount. The free trial gives 10 credits, up to 8 megapixels, with a watermark.
Clarity is an independent developer's project, with open source code. It offers Crystal, a faithful upscaler that goes up to 1.5 gigapixels, and Clarity, creative, up to 178 megapixels. The Starter subscription costs $19 a month, $13 billed yearly, but the most interesting part is the pay-as-you-go API: a 4K image, about 16 megapixels, costs $0.20 in Crystal and $0.08 in Clarity.
Both are good choices for regular volumes, or for a developer who wants to plug an upscaler into an app. For occasional use, the monthly subscription remains the weak point of both.
Photoshop and Lightroom: if you already pay Adobe
Photoshop's Generative Upscale works at 2x or 4x with three models, Firefly up to 6144 × 6144 pixels, Topaz Gigapixel up to 56 megapixels and Topaz Bloom up to 9; Lightroom doubles linear resolution, once per image.
If you already have an Adobe subscription, the question looks different: upscaling is right there, in the tool you open every day. Photoshop offers a Generative Upscale with three models, according to Adobe's help page updated on 20 May 2026: Firefly Upscaler to restore, up to 6144 × 6144 pixels; Topaz Gigapixel to preserve detail, up to 56 megapixels, for premium subscriptions; and Topaz Bloom to add creative detail, up to 9 megapixels.
Lightroom has its older Super Resolution: it doubles linear resolution, so it quadruples the pixel count, produces a new DNG file, and can only be applied once per image. It is a faithful upscaler, simple, with no settings, very good for a camera photo that is a little short.
The ceilings are the real limit: 9 megapixels in creative mode is an A4 or Letter page at 300 dpi and not much more. For a poster, you will need another tool or a second pass. The pixels needed for each format are covered in printing an AI image large.
Leonardo, Recraft, Canva, Picsart: upscaling as a bonus
At Leonardo and Recraft, the upscaler is a feature of a generator, with a precise and a creative mode; at Canva and Picsart, it is a button with no published spec sheet.
Leonardo advertises a Pro Upscaler up to 8x and 105 megapixels, with a Precise or Creative choice. The Essential plan costs $12 a month, $10 billed yearly, and the free plan gives 150 tokens a day. The token cost of an upscale is not published on the page.
Recraft has two upscalers, Crisp, faithful, and Creative. In the API, Crisp costs $0.004 per request and Creative $0.25. In the app, creative upscaling only appears from the Basic plan, $12 a month or $10 billed yearly.
Canva and Picsart offer a photo enhancement button, handy in their workflow, but neither publishes a factor, a ceiling or a model. For a social media visual, it is enough. For a print or a photo that matters, you do not know what you are getting.
Imaginode: Topaz by the megapixel, on the canvas
On Imaginode, Topaz Precision costs 12 credits for any image that comes out under 24 megapixels and Topaz Bloom 2 is billed per 2-megapixel block, on the same balance as generations, up to 100 megapixels of output.
Let's be upfront, this is our tool: Imaginode did not build its own upscaler, it gives access to Topaz's two image models, Precision for faithful and Bloom 2 for creative, in the canvas Enhance node, with a 2x or 4x factor and the price shown before you run it. No subscription dedicated to upscaling: you pay per image, in credits, from the same balance as everything else.
Prices: Topaz Precision, 12 credits up to 24 megapixels of output, which covers a 4x of a 1024-pixel image; 23 credits up to 48 megapixels; 34 up to 72. Topaz Bloom 2, 34 credits for a 2x of a 1024-pixel image, 101 for a 4x. The output ceiling is 100 megapixels.
The main benefit is not the price, it is the place in the chain. The upscale plugs into the output of a generation or a retouch, on the same canvas, and follows along if you change something upstream. It is also available on each layer of the Retouch node and in the edit_image tool of the MCP server. For a specific blurry photo, sharpen a photo starts with the right settings.
Which one to pick, case by case
Zero budget: Upscayl. High photo volume, locally: Topaz Gigapixel. Creative on generated images: Magnific. Already an Adobe subscriber: Photoshop. Occasional upscales inside a creative chain: a tool paid per image.
You have no budget and a decent graphics card: Upscayl, free, local, no account. You process hundreds of photos a month and want to work locally: Topaz Gigapixel, $149 a year, remains the benchmark. You are a developer and want an API: Clarity, per megapixel, or Recraft Crisp at $0.004 per request.
You mostly upscale generated images, illustrations, concepts, and you want them to gain texture: Magnific is the tool that goes furthest in creative mode, from €12 a month billed yearly. You already pay for Photoshop: its Generative Upscale covers most needs up to A4 or Letter.
You upscale now and then, a poster, an image for a client, a family photo, in the middle of other creative work: a tool paid per image saves you yet another subscription. That is the use case Imaginode is built for. And whatever the tool, set it to faithful for real photos.
The summary
Choose the mode first, faithful or creative, then the payment model that fits your volume, then the tool: the engines are more alike than the brands suggest.
Entry prices read on 6 October 2026: Upscayl free, Topaz Gigapixel $149 a year, Topaz for Web Image $12 a month on promotion, Magnific €12 a month billed yearly, Krea Pro $21 a month billed yearly, Let's Enhance $9 a month billed yearly, Clarity pay as you go from $0.005 per megapixel, Leonardo $10 a month billed yearly, Imaginode per image from 12 credits.
Promotional prices change often, check them on the vendor's page before committing. What does not change is the underlying rule: creative reinvents, faithful rebuilds, and neither one recovers a face thirty pixels tall.
For video, the landscape is different and prices are counted per second: that is the subject of the best AI video upscalers.