Lately (roughly 8-10 month) there is a stream of artificially upscaled images either replacing older posts or posted anew. Just an example:

E621:

Original on FA:

I ran up into some which were upscaled x6 (8k images vs. 1280), there are some neural network ones which double that.
People have to consider to stop this. It has no purpose aside from from "seizing" upload credit and it's against upload guidelines, afaik. Unless that rule was abolished and I missed the memo?
The problems:

a) They are impossible to view without downloading them, because they don't fit screen and e621 page does't work with EVERY browser to fit it (actually, I saw it working only on Android Chrome). You barely can see 1/10 of image.
b) They take ages to load and large amount of memory, Cloudflare cuts connection, some images are so huge that mobile browsers fail to downscale them. After multiple attempts CloudFlare decides to go into captcha mode.
c) Usually there is no quality improvement, as those images create new artifacts when downscaled by browser or viewer software, e.g. this one creates "broken pixels on display" effect - pixels of distinct color which wasn't there in original.

You can send a direct message to anyone who's doing this and inform them. Might be more effective than a forum post.

I don't think that's an upscale. The dots on the outline would be way more "washed-out" it would look like an overdraw with watercolors.

• Upscale without artifact removal
• Upscale with artifact removal

I think that one's just FA having automatically resized the image downwards. It does that to images over 1280 pixels in either direction.

I think your example was posted by the commissioner who would likely have access to the original, non-downscaled image.

furrin_gok said:
I think that one's just FA having automatically resized the image downwards. It does that to images over 1280 pixels in either direction.

Yeah , FA does that and if uploading a jpeg, it creates that increased artifacting, because their pipeline does double recoding in that case.

dubsthefox said:
I don't think that's an upscale. The dots on the outline would be way more "washed-out" it would look like an overdraw with watercolors.

• Upscale without artifact removal
• Upscale with artifact removal

Funny enough, the latter one got more aliasing artifact than the first. That's based on FA one, right? you also removed jpeg artifacts in both, they were quite visible on FA and there is hint of them e621, while format of image doesn't match them. Both yours look better than one on e621, that's what I'm confused about, I tried to upscale and compare myself too. Or it's some issue with browser rendering compressed image while trying to fit it, along with color space -
Photoshop doesn't show that image in same way and same colors. I considered that it's some GPU-based upscaling tool is used. The bleed that could be paint... The work is digital, so it's a digital bleed, but really doesn't look like one, unless lineart was scanned and cleaned up digitally...

swiftkill said:
Funny enough, the latter one got more aliasing artifact than the first. That's based on FA one, right? you also removed jpeg artifacts in both, they were quite visible on FA and there is hint of them e621, while format of image doesn't match them. Both yours look better than one on e621, that's what I'm confused about, I tried to upscale and compare myself too. Or it's some issue with browser rendering compressed image while trying to fit it, along with color space -
Photoshop doesn't show that image in same way and same colors. I considered that it's some GPU-based upscaling tool is used. The bleed that could be paint... The work is digital, so it's a digital bleed, but really doesn't look like one, unless lineart was scanned and cleaned up digitally...

I wouldn't really call waifu2x greasy lines an improvement. The original isn't artifacting, it's a textured brush.

I agree with Ratte, that larger image is 100% just the native resolution that image was drawn at. There's no way the details in the lines are anything but a brush texture. No AI upscaling I've encountered so far produces fine details like that.

Too bad it's not like MP3s where I can tell almost instantly if it's transcoded from a lower-detail source using even the most basic of graph tools. Lossy masters are a thing but usually it's a bad sign if a file at 256Kb/s is at EXACTLY the cutoff for 128Kb/s.

People uploading a 10MB JPEG of an originally 1MB PNG would be pretty stupid, agreed. "LOL, higher quality! My filesize says so!" :grumpycat:

notmenotyou said:
I agree with Ratte, that larger image is 100% just the native resolution that image was drawn at. There's no way the details in the lines are anything but a brush texture. No AI upscaling I've encountered so far produces fine details like that.

This means there's probably a tool or one can be made, that detects this and flags said user.

alphamule said:
This means there's probably a tool or one can be made, that detects this and flags said user.

If there's a tool to detect it there's also a tool to create these fine details. These kinda go hand-in-hand. But yeah, a waifu detector probably can be made fairly easily.

alphamule said:
Too bad it's not like MP3s where I can tell almost instantly if it's transcoded from a lower-detail source using even the most basic of graph tools. Lossy masters are a thing but usually it's a bad sign if a file at 256Kb/s is at EXACTLY the cutoff for 128Kb/s.

People uploading a 10MB JPEG of an originally 1MB PNG would be pretty stupid, agreed. "LOL, higher quality! My filesize says so!" :grumpycat:

This means there's probably a tool or one can be made, that detects this and flags said user.

That actually happens. And even with non-lossy master file, if it is too large, browsers on some platform have to fit into limitations of embedded hardware and do lossy compression to display image. Not to mention that until recently 90% of hardware was only 16bit color and even if it wasn't, e.g. Samsung Galaxy series, mainstream software wasn't supporting 32bit extension. Where texture plus artifacts may create odd effects. Which apparently what did hit me.

aversioncapacitor' said:
If there's a tool to detect it there's also a tool to create these fine details. These kinda go hand-in-hand. But yeah, a waifu detector probably can be made fairly easily.

Multi-scaled template matching and OpenCV might be the answer. I didn't looked into it, I'm not a specialist in RSP.

aversioncapacitor' said:
If there's a tool to detect it there's also a tool to create these fine details. These kinda go hand-in-hand. But yeah, a waifu detector probably can be made fairly easily.

To be fair, if someone wanted to be an asshole, they could have injected fake 19KHz noise in the transcoded MP3s, too. That would have taken special effort to prove. i.e. more than just histogram-level graphs of frequency over time.

swiftkill said:
That actually happens. And even with non-lossy master file, if it is too large, browsers on some platform have to fit into limitations of embedded hardware and do lossy compression to display image. Not to mention that until recently 90% of hardware was only 16bit color and even if it wasn't, e.g. Samsung Galaxy series, mainstream software wasn't supporting 32bit extension. Where texture plus artifacts may create odd effects. Which apparently what did hit me.

Eww, relying on browser to do compression. :P Yes, phones are by default awful computing platforms, unless you go out of way, say by installing Busybox+Termux.

Like the others said, it's likely the other way around. FA compresses image uploads really bad. The one on E6 is the original uncompressed version.

A little hack for anyone interested, you can avoid FA's compression by going back to the submission and updating the source file. For some reason FA will compress the first upload, but not source file replacements.

whitev said:
Like the others said, it's likely the other way around. FA compresses image uploads really bad. The one on E6 is the original uncompressed version.

A little hack for anyone interested, you can avoid FA's compression by going back to the submission and updating the source file. For some reason FA will compress the first upload, but not source file replacements.

For now... :D
Actually, it took years for people to notice that gallery permission is not the same as profile permission. Not entirely sure that was a bug.

alphamule said:
For now... :D
Actually, it took years for people to notice that gallery permission is not the same as profile permission. Not entirely sure that was a bug.

This aged very well lol. FA just announced that they'll be supporting native high-resolution files in the next update.
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10321622