I get that artifical upscales can often look a bit grainy or low-quality, but what about if sites that generate extremely high-quality upscales like waifu2x.ud.jp are used? Is there another reason why we don't like upscales? (I'm not trying to be rude.)
Ability to post high-quality upscales would be useful because they could be viewed in more detail, also giving them the ability to be used in things like T-Shirt Designs and such easier. Of course, low quality upscales aren't alright, but I really think we should give some artifical upscalers a chance, like waifu2x.ud.jp.
Any page involving posts, the moderation, and some other things would be affected.

Upscales are just not good in general. The only thing you should do is find the highest quality of image available from the source site.

Please don't write in all bold.

And no, upscales done with waifu2x are still bad and inferior to the original file.

Like NotMeNotYou said, upscales are considered inferior here. There's a couple good reasons I can think of off the top of my head for that:

1) Many artists gate pristine high resolution versions behind a Patreon paywall

Artificially upscaling may at first appear like we're posting DNP content, since simple lines and shading are easy to soften by things like waifu2x. If an artist sees a huge res image here, their first instinct is to assume people are sharing something behind their paywall and ask for DNP status as fast as possible. Many artists that I've met are *very* reactionary and not analytical, meaning it's unlikely that they'll look twice and see that it's an upscale instead.

2) Upscaling blurs out finer detail

Often, detail in carefully crafted digital or traditional media is lost in translation. Image data doesn't just magically appear--it's softened and spread out in a way designed to mitigate jagged edges along lines from small PNGs or compression artifacts in JPGs, but finer detail is often a casualty of that as well. It's far easier to put a blanket ban on upscales than deal with which ones look alright based on detail-sparse flat shading and ones which look like a bastardization of the source material.

3) Version control + you can do it yourself

When sharing data, it's best to leave the original file as intact as possible. This makes sure any metadata is preserved and allows for easier reverse searching than a slightly altered image with a potentially different MD5 hash. If a source is no longer functional or deleted, you can utilize the unadulterated image as means to find another valid source and add to the list next to the submission accordingly. It's just part of making it easy to properly credit and attribute artists.

Additionally, you can always take an image from e621 or the original source and upscale it for a personal, off-site gallery. The opposite--that is, downscaling an upscaled image--leads to an inaccurate representation of the source material, which is not a positive thing for archival purposes.

NotMeNotYou said:
Please don't write in all bold.

And no, upscales done with waifu2x are still bad and inferior to the original file.

Alright. But the feature thing suggests that you use bold text.

Strongbird said:
Like NotMeNotYou said, upscales are considered inferior here. There's a couple good reasons I can think of off the top of my head for that:

1) Many artists gate pristine high resolution versions behind a Patreon paywall

Artificially upscaling may at first appear like we're posting DNP content, since simple lines and shading are easy to soften by things like waifu2x. If an artist sees a huge res image here, their first instinct is to assume people are sharing something behind their paywall and ask for DNP status as fast as possible. Many artists that I've met are *very* reactionary and not analytical, meaning it's unlikely that they'll look twice and see that it's an upscale instead.

2) Upscaling blurs out finer detail

Often, detail in carefully crafted digital or traditional media is lost in translation. Image data doesn't just magically appear--it's softened and spread out in a way designed to mitigate jagged edges along lines from small PNGs or compression artifacts in JPGs, but finer detail is often a casualty of that as well. It's far easier to put a blanket ban on upscales than deal with which ones look alright based on detail-sparse flat shading and ones which look like a bastardization of the source material.

3) Version control + you can do it yourself

When sharing data, it's best to leave the original file as intact as possible. This makes sure any metadata is preserved and allows for easier reverse searching than a slightly altered image with a potentially different MD5 hash. If a source is no longer functional or deleted, you can utilize the unadulterated image as means to find another valid source and add to the list next to the submission accordingly. It's just part of making it easy to properly credit and attribute artists.

Additionally, you can always take an image from e621 or the original source and upscale it for a personal, off-site gallery. The opposite--that is, downscaling an upscaled image--leads to an inaccurate representation of the source material, which is not a positive thing for archival purposes.

True, I just thought that upscaling looked nice at times, but I didn't really know that tools like Waifu2x didn't create quality upscales.

That's for the template. :v

The template is there for you to copy it, and then write what you believe should be under each question. Having the template's questions in bold helps visually split up your post into their respective parts and helps legibility.

For example this is easier to skim thanks to the bolder categories.

malleablecrowbar said:
True, I just thought that upscaling looked nice at times, but I didn't really know that tools like Waifu2x didn't create quality upscales.

even thought it might look nice at first glance, it does more or less damage to the quality. for example this is what happened when i ran your avatar through waifu x2

even thought it mostly looks fine, you can see some scaling errors in the eyes where the program didnt really know what to do with the very small details. it also amplified the slight bumps and thickness differences in lineart really badly.

Ledian said:
even thought it might look nice at first glance, it does more or less damage to the quality. for example this is what happened when i ran your avatar through waifu x2

even thought it mostly looks fine, you can see some scaling errors in the eyes where the program didnt really know what to do with the very small details. it also amplified the slight bumps and thickness differences in lineart really badly.

Yeah, I did notice that, thank you for the info.

NotMeNotYou said:
That's for the template. :v

The template is there for you to copy it, and then write what you believe should be under each question. Having the template's questions in bold helps visually split up your post into their respective parts and helps legibility.

For example this is easier to skim thanks to the bolder categories.

Thank you for being nice about it and not just being like "lol noob you were supposed to put the text under the bold". (I'm not being sarcastic, I'm legitimately grateful you weren't too upset that I'm not used to e621 because I've barely used it and keep making errors. Sorry for the troubles btw, I'll try to be more consistent in the future!)

malleablecrowbar said:

True, I just thought that upscaling looked nice at times, but I didn't really know that tools like Waifu2x didn't create quality upscales.

It's not really that it doesn't create quality upscales -- it's just in the same vein that as that CSI 'Enhance!' bullshit. The best extrapolation in the world can't create accurate information from nothing. At best, it can produce something that appears pleasing and not obviously wrong.

Strongbird pretty well summarized this.

Another issue is that we do not host dublicates. So if someone does upload upscale of already exsisting post, either or needs to be deleted and as upscales are always inferior, that would need to be deleted.

Then there's issue with upscaling methods being just computer alghorithms estimating stuff meaning when they get updated, the post here needs to be replaced with better upscale, etc. Just insane amount of intense more work for basically something that EVERYONE can do themselves easily.