AI Upscaling: Achieving Unmatched Detail and Clarity in Visuals

2026 = The end of upscaling?

One of generative AI's biggest drawbacks was the resolution, and I'm not talking about the output resolution as 1080p would be enough for most of the projects. I'm talking about the "internal" resolution of how these models work, that makes small faces distorted in your generations, the ones that will make a wide-shot impossible because the small details will morph and of course with some models text rendering is not possible.

Upscaling with AI was always a strange case, local upscalers sometimes lacked the quality compared to the closed source competitors, but those can be pretty pricey and the results are sometimes way too "creative".

So I was very, very interested when @Kling_ai announced native, not upscaled 4K generation but wanted to have a good method test it. Again, I never missed the 4K output resolution with genAI, but I missed the nuanced detail rendering of the engines and the lack of that made it impossible to create for example very wide shots with tiny details. So I fired up some image models to generate stills inspired by Morocco and see how Kling behaves, now in 4K.

Some notable moments:
00:22 - Skin and eye texture, the movements, the little coins in the headdress
01:18 - The reflection in the water
01:39 - The reflection in the eye, and the scarf textures
02:10 - Check all the details on the rails
02:20 - Water particles and leaves
02:29 - The rendering of the rusty parts of the rail
02:50 - How the waves change the reflection in the foreground
02:55 - The cloud movement in the background