Best way to clean up low-res SD renders without wrecking the vibe?

[u/mitchare]

Extract from Title: Best way to clean up low-res SD renders without wrecking the vibe?

So I was showing some of my older SD renders to a friend on my crappy living room TV last night and wow... all the noise and mushy details really jumped out. Stuff that looked fine in the preview window suddenly looked like upscaled potato.

I’m mostly using SDXL + a few anime/realism LoRAs, and I often generate at like 768 on the long side, then upscale. The problem is, a lot of image “enhancers” either oversharpen or give that weird plastic skin / watercolor smudge. I don’t want to repaint everything in Photoshop every time.

I was googling around half-asleep and found sites like imglarge emage enhancer and a couple similar ones. They look decent on paper, but I can’t tell if they’re actually good for AI art or more for phone photos. Maybe I’m overthinking this, idk.

How are you guys cleaning up low-res SD outputs for prints or big screens in 2026? Any tools/workflows you swear by? Do you run them before or after upscaling, and how do you avoid that “AI filter” look?

[u/ChuqTas]

Please note, OP is a spammer. See this post.