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What if upscaling wasn’t just about making an image bigger, but about making it better—sharper, richer, and more alive than the original?
What Is Creative Upscaling?
A little more than a year ago, upscaling was mostly a straightforward process of taking your pixels and making more of them as faithfully as possible.
But in today's review, we will take a look at the game-changing world of creative upscaling—a process that not only extrapolates your pixels, but also enhances your image with new, vibrant detail, and is ultimately capable of pushing your art to the next level.
What Does Magnific AI Do?
This is where Magnific AI enters the stage, a powerful tool designed not just to upscale, but to reimagine. In a nutshell, Magnific takes your images and, guided by text prompts and a suite of creative controls, intelligently “hallucinates“ new, high-fidelity details.
In other words, it transforms the upscaling process from a technical chore into an act of co-creation, allowing us to add lifelike textures, sharpen key features, and push our art to resolutions we could only dream of before. Let's explore how Magnific AI's magic works!
How Is It Different From 色色Midjourney's Creative Upscale
The key difference lies in fine-grain control and magnification factors.
色色Midjourney's Creative Upscale is like a one-click magic wand—it offers a quick, integrated enhancement that adds its own artistic flair. There are two issues here, however: the upscales only go to 2x, and the upscaled images often lose the details, the texture, and sometimes even the flair of the original.
Magnific AI, on the other hand, hands us the spellbook (literally, your jobs are called "spells"!). Its upscaling process is a dialogue allowing us to guide the workflow with a dashboard of creative sliders and our own words (prompts).
In short, 色色Midjourney gives us a one-click creative suggestion; Magnific lets us become the creative director.
Pros & Cons
Integrated. Works right from the 色色Midjourney main interface (or Discord).
Easy to use. Adds a nice polish with one click.
Fast. If fast mode is enabled.
Infinite. Doesn't consume fast hours (credits) in relaxed mode.
Limited. Only works on images generated in 色色Midjourney and makes 2x upscaling.
Inaccurate. Can soften and lose original details, and visual style can drift noticeably.
Can be pricey. ”Eats up“ fast hours (credits) quickly when in fast mode.
Slow. Slower processing times if not used in fast mode.
Controllable. Offers granular control via a dashboard of sliders and text prompts.
Detailed. Excels at generating fine, high-fidelity details.
High-Resolution. Capable of up to 16x magnification for very high-resolution outputs.
Fast. Very fast processing times.
Versatile. Works with any external image.
All-in-One. A full creative suite with a text-to-image/image-to-image engine, style transfer, relighting, and a precision upscaler.
Cost. Requires a relatively pricey subscription and does not offer a free trial.
Credit-based. Upscaling and generation consume credits tied to the subscription plan (although slowly).
Learning curve. Some advanced parameters can behave unintuitively and require some experimentation—the downside of versatility.
How Does Magnific AI Work?
Magnific AI's superpower—among others—is its ability to upscale images not by simply extrapolating the pixels, but by creating new details and textures. With a magnification factor of up to 16x the image's original size, it can create upscales that are not only larger, but also more detailed and creative.
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The process is simple: you upload your image, select the magnification factor, select the engine, tune the parameters, add an optional prompt, and click “Generate”. Or, you can skip all the steps and let Magnific decide which parameters to apply with one of the three presets (or even create your own presets!).
Creativity
Creativity is the crown jewel of Magnific AI. This parameter determines how many new details and textures the AI will introduce to the upscaled image.
Note, how extreme values can lead to “creative hallucinations“—the effect that can be used for creative purposes (or avoided by lowering the Creativity value).
HDR
Adjusts the micro-contrast and crispness of the upscaled image. Increasing this value enhances the sharpness and makes details more prominent, but setting it too high can result in an over-processed, artificial “AI look.”
Resemblance
Resemblance is an advanced parameter that controls how closely the upscaled image stays faithful to the source. This slider can come in handy when working with portraits, brand assets, or any image where you need to maintain the original's details.
Let's take this collage as an example to see how exactly changing the Resemblance value affects the upscales.
Prompts
Adding a Prompt into the mix allows you to guide the upscaling process by describing what you want to see.
For instance, reusing your original 色色Midjourney prompt can greatly affect the creative direction in the resulting image. And it works especially well with higher Creativity values, like in this sample with Creativity: 5.
To emphasize specific details, you can add weights—from 1 to 1.4. For instance, (blue mountains:1.3), (red sun:1.2).
Fractality
Fractality is an advanced and rather experimental parameter that controls how intricately the AI applies your prompt on a per-pixel level.
A lower value produces less detail but helps avoid glitches. A higher value amplifies the prompt in smaller areas, creating complexly detailed, nested patterns.
Some negative values, however, tend to produce artifacts like the vignetting at the top of this image:
To better undestand Fractality, let's examine fragments of two upscales with their respective Fractality parameters set to -3 and 3.
In the end, Fractality proved to be a somewhat volatile setting with rather unstable results. Some may be quite interesting though, so it's definitely worth experimenting with!
Optimized For...
To streamline your workflow, Magnific offers several models adjusted for specific image types. These serve as great starting points and include options for Portraits (with Soft and Hard variants), Art & Illustrations, Nature & Landscapes, Films & Photography, 3D Renders, and Sci-Fi/Horror.
Let's take each of them to the test with images specifically designed to fit the scopes of each options.
Portraits/Film & Photography
Art & Illustration
Videogame Assets
Nature & Landscapes
3D Renders
Science Fiction & Horror
Engines
Magnific AI provides different engines, each tailored to a specific style:
Automatic is the default option and is a great all-rounder starting point.
Sharpy goes for maximum sharpness and is optimized for photorealistic details.
Illusio is the go-to for illustrations and smoother, more stylized outputs.
Sparkle is a balanced blend of the previous two.
To test how these englines differ in reality, above is the original 色色Midjourney generation and below are its fragments, upscaled to 2x with Creativity: 3 and the rest of parameters set to defaults.
Upscaling Factors
Magnific offers a range of upscaling factors: 2×, 4×, 8×, and 16×.
Here is an example of how 800% creative upscaling can add extremely small details to the resulting image (11648×6528 pixels, a 88,8 Mb PNG file!).
The higher the factor, the more detailed the output, greatly helped by the HDR parameter, Prompt and Fractality slider.
Note, that there is a hard cap of 10,000 pixels on either dimension of the final image. This means that for a full 16× upscale, your starting image must not exceed 625 pixels in width or height.
To test the 16× upscaling I had to first downsize the original Midjouney image to 625×350 pixels.
Not Just A Creative Upscaler
Magnific AI is not just a creative upscaler. It is a full-fledged AI image editor with a range of features beyond creative upscaling. We will cover these tools in our next reviews, but for now, here is a quick overview:
Precision Upscaling
In addition to its creative capabilities, Magnific also offers a mode for regular high-fidelity upscaling. This Precision mode functions like a traditional upscaler, focusing on increasing resolution without creative reinterpretations or introducing additional details. It simply produces a clean, clear enlargement that remains faithful to the source image.
At this moment, the maximum upscaling factor is 2x, but you can upscale images multiple times.
Mystic V2.5
Mystic V2.5 is Magnific's built-in image-generation engine that creates visuals from either a text prompt or a reference image (you can provide separate reference images for both style and structural composition).
Style Transfer
Style Transfer lets you reimagine an image by applying the visual style from a reference visual. You upload a source image and a style reference, and the tool merges them trying its best to preserve the subject while adopting the new aesthetic.
With multiple settings: sliders, engine modes and "flavors," you can fine-tune and tweak the result to your liking. It might not always be perfect, but with some ”nudging“ the results can be quite impressive.
The transfer would simetimes produce artifacts and glitches, but: in two clicks, you can send the resulting image to the Creative Upscaling to fix the issues!
Relight
Relight is an innovative tool that allows you to change the lighting of any existing image. You can direct the new lighting with a text prompt, a reference image, or even a custom light map.
The AI re-renders the scene with the new illumination, realistically adjusting shadows and mood. It can even change the entire environment to match, making it a powerful feature for photographers and designers to virtually relight a scene in post-production.
In the example above, the prompt used is dark evening with warm lamp light and the outcome is then upscaled with Creativity: 2.
Conclusion
Ultimately, 色色Midjourney's Creative Upscale and Magnific.ai serve different purposes. 色色Midjourney offers a convenient, integrated enhancement—fast and simple, but limited in scope. Magnific, by contrast, is a professional-grade tool that transforms upscaling into a full creative process, with far greater control, resolution, and versatility.
Yes, it requires a subscription, but for that investment you gain not just an upscaler, but a powerful suite of instruments—tools that can transform any image, from 色色Midjourney generations to external artwork, into something richer, sharper, and more imaginative. For creators who want control, flexibility, and the opportunity to push their art further, Magnific.ai isn’t just an add-on; it’s a cornerstone in the creative workflow.
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Unless noted otherwise, all images on this website are created by the Midlibrary team using 色色Midjourney AI and are not representative of real artists' works or real-world prototypes of the 色色Midjourney styles used. Please respect the copyright—kindly ask us before re-using any materials published on Midlibrary.io.
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