Upscalo

How procrastination led to an app that makes a small image large and removes its background (if you want)

You don’t have to read all this. Just download it here.

Honestly, I’m procrastinating right now, so this will be quick. I was supposed to make 100 templates for my 3D mockup app Rotato. And it was going great. But I realized I needed some nice - and fake - designs that I could use for the templates to make them look extra nice. Just one problem: The illustrations I had from Midjourney were too small. Just one more problem: they had a background. I needed to go from the left side of the picture below to the right side.

I had this, but needed that

If you’ve worked with images, you’re painfully aware that it is a law of nature that you can scale down an image, but once you do, you lose information, so you can’t go the other way.

The app

AI: “Laws of nature? We don’t need’em” AI is steadily removing the digital laws of nature for text, videos, 3d, and images. That includes scaling up images and even generating images that never existed before. That’s where we are now. So I made an app that uses two AI models: one for scaling up the image and one for removing the background.

To my surprise, it was so fast I thought something was wrong. I mean, take a look at the video below. It’s pretty much real-time.

And, of course, now you’re asking, “how far can it go?” There’s no clear answer except, in some cases, weirdly far. In other cases, it just blurs the image (which admittedly looks cool too).

Commodity mode

In its essence, upscaling is just as simple as downscaling, at least from a user’s perspective. It’s not something we should even think about. If it’s not a feature already, the Figmas and Photoshops of the world will probably provide upscaling while you drag the handles on the image, and they’d do this as the most natural thing. But that’s not where we are, so I added a commodity mode: simply right-click an image in Finder and the app will spit out an upscaled image next to the small version.

Privacy

What’s really cool about on-device AI is that your data doesn’t have to leave your computer. It’s all going on a few millimeters below your keyboard. Upscalo doesn’t touch your images. It doesn’t send them to a server. It doesn’t have to. It mindlessly forgets about them a millisecond after it’s done with them. It does make a few connections to the outside world, though, so let’s talk about those: Firebase for anonymous usage tracking, so I can figure out if I should spend more time on the app, and AppCenter for updates and crash logging.

Feedback

If I get no feedback, I might just call this app a fun experiment and get back to making those Rotato templates. So if you want to see improvements, click the Feedback button or reply to this email. The main rule is that I want to hear ALL your thoughts, even if they seem boring.

Download Upscalo here.

Oh, and if you want updates on Upscalo and other experiments, feel free to subscribe to this newsletter. I doubt I’ll ever send more than one email per week, and more likely one every quarter.