Generative upscale, enlarging images in Photoshop

A new feature in Photoshop Beta, is Generative Upscale. It uses generative ai to enlarge an image and improve its quality. How to get Photoshop Beta.

Let’s look at how it works and compare it to 2 other ai upscales in Photoshop (yes, there are 3, 4 if you count Super resolution for Raw files in ACR).ere is an image at 100% size.

Choose Image>Size.

You can see its 667×1000

Click on Open in Generative Upscale.

You will notice that there are 3 options, 2x, 3x and 4x.

We are using 4X

Press Upscale

At the moment it only goes up to 4096, which is plenty for many things. On the Adobe website, it implies that it might go larger when out of beta.

It also says it doesn’t use Gen credits while in beta, which also implies it will use them out of beta.

A new document is created and appears smooth for something blown up so much. Let examine closer.

There are 2 layers. Upscale and original.

This is the enhanced layer.

Here is the original layer, which would be like free transforming to the larger size.

The battle of Ai resizing in Photoshop. Generative Upscale, Vs Preserve Details 2.0 vs Super Zoom

As I mentioned before, this isn’t Adobes first ai resizer in Photoshop, but it is the first to use Firefly Generative ai. The older ones used Sensei.

Choose Image>Size

For resample, we are using Preserve Details 2.0 which is also ai.

Take it up to 4000 px.

Make another copy and choose Filter>Neural Filters. Grab Super Zoom.

Make it 4x.

I dragged all the different results into separate layers to compare. The video shows the process.

This is easier to see on the video because its full size, but this is Preserve Details 2.0 (Image>Size).
Click on following 3 images to see larger

Super Zoom

Gen Upscale.

I also tried it with some designs using text.

It seemed that Gen upscale didi the face and photographic elements the best, but did alter details.

Preserve Details 2.0 seems to do text the best.

So the solution is to make masks and combine the different layers for the best result. (On the video)

My verdict is that Gen Upscale does a very nice job, however, because it actually redraws the entire image with ai, it does smoothen things too much. In some cases faces can look a bit cartoonish. This is still in Beta though, so it shows a lot of promise.

Hopefully you found this tutorial useful. Here is the tutorial that shows all the new features in this Photoshop release! (July 29 2025)

Great to see you at the CAFE

Colin

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