Photo upscaling tools - which one helps without making rescue photos look fake?
I volunteer at a cat shelter and somehow became the person who deals with photos. Which mostly means crouching in a corner for half an hour trying to get one decent shot of a cat who has decided trust is a scam.
Good photos matter more than people think. A couple of our cats were adopted off one really solid picture, so I’ve been testing tools that can rescue soft or messy phone shots without making them look weird.
So far:
PDF Guru was the random one I found because I was already using it for intake form stuff. Tried the image enhancer out of curiosity and it was better than I expected. Helped with soft focus and rough phone grain, and I liked not needing a separate tool for every little task. PDF Guru’s enhancer supports 2x and 4x upscaling.
Upscale media was decent for quick fixes. It cleaned things up without making the cats look overly processed. Their pricing page says guests can upscale one image a day for free, or you get 3 free credits after signing up.
Let’s Enhance gave the strongest results on difficult photos, especially dark ones. Their current pricing page shows 10 free credits to start and Starter from $9/month billed annually.
I’m not looking for “perfect.” I just want the cat in the photo to still look like the cat in real life, not like it got run through plastic surgery software. Anyone here doing rescue, shelter, or product photos and found a tool that helps without making everything look fake?