How's this better than the other image? This one's all blurry...

daedius said:
How's this better than the other image? This one's all blurry...

It's a much larger source (3900x2550 vs 1280x837).

watsit said:
It's a much larger source (3900x2550 vs 1280x837).

Looks like the image was just upscaled, it's all blurred. :/

daedius said:
Looks like the image was just upscaled, it's all blurred. :/

If you actually look at 100% zoom something like smaller lines on paws, there's tons of really fine lines which in the FA version of the image are just black blobs or aren't visible at all.
So that already tells me this cannot be upscaled at the very least, because when upscaling, you cannot get more detail and even AI would just make those into vague shaky lines most likely.

Another funny thing with how bitmaps work is that when you downscale something properly, you can actually get rid of imperfections and make everything look cleaner. Some artists rely on this method when they draw with huge canvases and then just in the end downscale it, new phone cameras have massive sensors so they can downscale the image from the sensor to fraction to provide much higher quality images, games can render at higher resolution and downscale to make the games look much cleaner and get rid of aliasing, etc.
In here to me it seems like they simply used downscaling interpolation that provides slight halo around high contrast areas to make the downscaled version look much sharper and keep smaller detail more visible but overall amount of detail is the same if downscaling this.

This version does miss the glossy pussy highlights and patreon watermark as well tho.