AI upscaling the toolbar icons

[admin]

Time to upscale. I tried about a dozen AI upscalers (to upscale icons from 24x24 to 48x48) and www.img2go.com was clearly the best and I find the results really impressive (see below; this was done with the free online trial and default settings; possible that the paid version offers some fine-tuning that makes it even better).
Let me know if you know a better upscaler.

Input 24x24:

XYToolbar-24x24.png (107.85 KiB) Viewed 391 times

Output 48x48:

XYToolbar-24x24_out-www.img2go.com.png (830.04 KiB) Viewed 391 times

[highend]

For upscaled icons, very good quality

[matewo]

Hi All,

I don't know, if non-AI upscaler could even compare, but have you considered testing gmic [1]?

Maybe something like scale2x [2] or upscale_smart [3]?

Best regards, Markus

P.S.: disclaimer: haven't tried it by myself.

[1]: https://gmic.eu
[2] : https://gmic.eu/reference/scale2x.html
[3]: https://gmic.eu/reference/upscale_smart.html

[admin]

It does not look like what I need. The ideal would be an upscaler that I could train. It would offer me variations and I would choose the one I like best.

[jupe]

The new internal icons look much better when zoomed now.

Just an observation, but one thing it makes stand out more though now, is that when using an ico source for a btn, XY doesn't seem to choose the larger icon available in the resource, so it upscales instead. For example if I extract a 256px ico and save as png, the quality is much better than just specifying the multi res ico source.

[admin]

XY should prefer in this order: 1) perfect match, 2) downscale, 3) upscale

What is your toolbar button size and toolbar zoom, and which sizes are contained in the icon resource?

[jupe]

In my normal conf I use large buttons, with a 1.1 zoom, but I see the issue when using fresh defaults, and while using various zoom levels, setting XL btns with 1x looks ok though, but still not the same.

I have found a good icon that demos the difference easily for me, but it happens with lots of ico sources from my testing, even if it is harder to tell with some. It looks to me like possibly XY is choosing the 4/8bit source instead of 32?. I have attached the ico and a png made from the ico, setting both to side by side CTB's you should easily notice the difference. Strange thing is if I use patchimage the difference is still there but nowhere near as noticeable, so somehow it seems the code is different for btns and ctbs.

[admin]

Yeah, this made it very obvious. Should be better in next beta.

[admin]

Is it better now?

[jupe]

Just upgraded now, hadn't yesterday.
I wrote a script which tested a heap of icons, which all looked much better, but it made me notice that compared to png the icons seemed to be offset a couple pixels, which makes some icons cropped slightly as indicated on screenshot, and I'm not sure if it is intentional or not, but the quality in the Customize Toolbar dialog is still low, which makes me think it isn't loading them from the same cache, but maybe that's not possible with int/ext png/ico mix. I made the screenshot with XL btns to exaggerate it, but it happens at smaller sizes too.

2024-04-05_115030.png (20.2 KiB) Viewed 137 times

[admin]

Interesting. Took me all morning. Finally turned out to be an AFAIK completely unknown GDI bug concerning ICO painting. Should work better in the next beta.