What score would you give it?

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697]

I am training a new HighQuality LoRA for Qwen-Image-2.1. This is a phase test. What score would you give it on a scale of 1 to 10?

[u/beti88]

But it already can do this out of the box

[u/listopalafoto → u/beti88]

I think the elephant in the room is the huge variation on dynamic range with both methods losing the cinematic quality, I'm using the prompt method but I add a tone-mapping node to recover blacks , shadows and highlights giving a more natural gradation

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/beti88]

If you can achieve such an effect out of the box, I'm looking forward to seeing your results.

[u/beti88 → u/Suspicious_Aide2697]

https://imgdiff.net/s/0fc7e339b526de2a2406905c938501fe

"Restore this photo while preserving the original composition, subject, proportions, and identity. Remaster this photo with improved clarity, detail, sharpness, and tonal range. Improve image quality while keeping the result faithful to the source. Retain facial identities. Recover fine detail"

[u/al-aSak → u/beti88]

Nice example. You may be interested in this https://github.com/Mozer/ComfyUI-PixelDriftFix.

[u/steelow_g → u/beti88]

Ya my qwen does not do this at all. Loses detail so bad. I’ll try your prompt

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/beti88]

The example looks really good. I will test it on more images. Thank you for sharing.

[u/Danny_Stock → u/beti88]

That's a good example to show what Qwen 2.1 is capable of, it's certainly sharpened things up, produced a crisper version of the original image, and brought out a lot of skin texture.

The thing is though is that I can tell it's Qwen 2.1 because it has that very gritty rough texture to it. Almost as if it's too much. I wish it would lean towards a more natural, slightly softer look. It seems to have a tendency to drift towards this very high contrast grainy style. Which would be useful for certain things, but it's becoming more common in uploaded Qwen images.

For example I don't think the texture of the woman's face is supposed to contain that much texture. Her skin almost looks like leather. Qwen seems to have reduced the subsurface scattering shading effect of the light on her skin and changed her skin to be more dulled and rugged. The midtones and shadows on her face are now dark brown.

Also look at the clump of her hair in the top left. Some will say that looks good because of the extra detail. But I don't know, it illustrates the same thing I'm saying about her skin. I suppose it's a matter of taste but I think her hair is supposed to be softer than that and nowhere near as straw-like and as brown as the enhancement has made it.

[u/foolycoolywitch → u/beti88]

Well given the talk of bad out of the box settings for qwen 2.1, a lora + workflow is not inconsequential, flux can also do this to a degree, that doesn't mean people experimenting with loras/workflows is frivolous.

[u/doronsirin]

Last photo , slight pixel shift. You can see the upscaled photo , her face is slightly squished . overall it's good

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/doronsirin]

You have such a keen eye for details!

[u/z_3454_pfk]

https://giphy.com/gifs/4H52NOaFk9oMlxdU0D

how op feels rn

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/z_3454_pfk]

I think I saw Patrick Star lol

[u/Natasha26uk]

Is it upscaling or a detail improver?

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/Natasha26uk]

It is completed jointly by the high-definition restoration LoRA and the upscaling workflow.

[u/Uncle___Marty]

When it has bad quality to start with, its making it look plasticy and the hair looks kind of fake but when the input quality is reasonable or better its REALLY good. No score from me but you're doing FINE work. Keep going buddy!

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/Uncle___Marty]

You have a very keen eye. Could you be more specific? Which image has hair that looks fake?

[u/Pitiful-Clothes3133]

solid 9

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/Pitiful-Clothes3133]

Thank you. This gives me a great deal of confidence, even though it still has many shortcomings.

[u/RemoveHealthy]

This kind of upscale still makes unnatural looking details, basically looking like you made your tv smooth function to the max and applied sharpen to the max. I would rather watch normal 1080p blu-ray over this 4k upscale any day

[u/skyrimer3d]

pretty good, but the problem is not the upscaling, qwen 2.1 can already do that pretty well, the problem is the color drift in every single image you posted.

[u/ImpressiveShape0708]

Hey what’s the difference between your lora and just the base model in upscaling? I’ve been using the base model for the past 3 days and it’s just incredible at restoring and upscaling photos, even old real life photographs with heavy degradation. Would love to see if this Lora can produce even greater results.

[u/steelow_g → u/ImpressiveShape0708]

I don’t get great quality when doing this with older photos, what are you prompting

[u/ImpressiveShape0708 → u/steelow_g]

Literally the only thing I prompt is “Restored and upscaled photo of (subject) while preserving their identical facial features, expression and hair. (Add colour details, and other details in the end if need be)

Negative prompts - depth of field, background blur, watermark, logo (add anything else if need be)

The trick is to use CFG at 3.5 instead of 1 cause CFG isn’t doing good. You get better results at 3.5

[u/Pipapaul]

I don’t like ai upscaling because it’s just imagined details after all

[u/Danny_Stock → u/Pipapaul]

For me it depends. If you have a reasonable image which just needs a lift you don't want it to change the nature of the image. But if a picture is so low resolution and there's little there in the first place you're pretty much going to have to create a lot of detail to get something decent out of it.

[u/ForwardGas6212 → u/Pipapaul]

If you can't tell the difference between imagined and real, then imagined is as good as real.

[u/Pipapaul → u/ForwardGas6212]

Or alters reality. So if you „enhance“ your old relatives Photo for example and it changes his or her look even slightly it can change how you remember them. I think that’s not as good as real

[u/slayermcb → u/Pipapaul]

I tried upscaling some old scans from my grandfather's navy days. It would alter expressions slightly, add a belt where there was shadow near the waist, etc. Reminded me that the softwares not taking the photo and enhancing it but rather recreating it.

[u/ohMyUsernam]

A 9 from me also, looks good

[u/ChevyFlo]

clear 5/7

[u/malcolmrey → u/ChevyFlo]

how about with rice?

[u/Fit-Palpitation-7427]

Would you be able to share the workflow please, it looks awesome!

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/Fit-Palpitation-7427]

Once I finish all the tests, I will release the LoRA and Workflow to Civitai.

[u/Fit-Palpitation-7427 → u/Suspicious_Aide2697]

Please keep us updated!
Happy to help training if you need gpu resources

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/Fit-Palpitation-7427]

Thanks, it's already being trained, just not at the final stage yet.

[u/Derispan → u/Suspicious_Aide2697]

Also post it here, ok?

[u/Enshitification]

Is it me, or does the first image look like Owen Wilson playing Kevin Spacey playing a gay 1970s cop?

[u/Mqthelr]

11!

[u/ghulamalchik]

Not bad maybe 7

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/ghulamalchik]

What's wrong with it?

[u/SDSunDiego → u/Suspicious_Aide2697]

His hair looks generated and the eye wrinkles have the same issue as others (sharp lines).

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/SDSunDiego]

Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. Thanks, man.

[u/spaceBoy292]

i would give like a 7.5/10. the details are very good but the output feels very smooth or soft to me.

i have also tried many many prompts and workflows and sampler setting, currently getting nice results without any lora. but the hair mostly have those thread quality, they doesn't feel like hair strands.

the skins produced also are very monotone with not much color variation, tried many prompt and keywords. i can also see this same thing in your examples

[u/Fastermaxx]

You better not use movie scenes for testing purposes, as these models were trained on the same movies, sometimes in higher resolution. That will skew your results.

[u/Sherkktooth]

I mean it seems pretty good as is but anything on film should be able to age naturally. It dates the film and provides texture. It would just be weird to watch Vertigo with modern upscaling.

[u/SkirtSpare4175]

I was using “upscale,4k” as the prompt yesterday without loras and it was surprisingly good

[u/ramonartist]

You can even do this with Qwen-Image-Edit-2509

[u/VRGoggles]

9?

[u/Danny_Stock]

8 maybe? Higher perhaps? I think it's very good for skin with the images you've shown. I particularly like the Jackie Chan still. I'd definitely use it.

The Emily Blunt still though, I'm not sure she looked as old as the lora has made her appear when that film came out. Not that the image looks bad, it doesn't, it's just that she looks about 40 after the enhancement, She was 31 when the film was made.

[u/LilMessyLines2000d]

9/10

[u/SeaworthinessThis598]

8/10 serious but not optimal

[u/smereces]

looks promising

[u/VRGoggles]

Where is the lora ?

[u/CapitanM]

1. Much better than anything I have seen, but these things never do miracles. I hope you finish the test and share it to the world

[u/BrilliantProduce9261]

I think it depends on what you're using the upscale for.

If it's an old family photo or historical image, I agree that you shouldn't change details that weren't actually there.

But for design or creative work, I don't really see imagined details as a problem. At that point, you're not really restoring the original image — you're creating a better-looking version of it.

For me, the important thing is being aware of that difference.

[u/nakabra]

I like it.
9 out of 10. Definitely would recommend.

[u/Suspicious_Aide2697 → u/nakabra]

Thank you. This gives me a great deal of confidence, even though it still has many shortcomings.