This may not seem to have much to do with cycling, and it doesn't. I have some YouTube channels and I have been playing with DALL-E to generate some imagery to make the videos more appealing. Here's an example.
I created a DALL-E account and asked it to create an image using the prompt "a cyclist on a long country road in perspective in the style of turner". I got this.
 |
| A cyclist on a long country road in perspective in the style of turner |
Actually it was one of four images. I chose this one because it encapsulated "long" the best. But it's 1024x1024 pixels. I want a 16:9 aspect ratio so I cropped it using Windows Photo Editor. I could also have used a technique called out-painting but that gobbles up DALL-E points. With cropping, the image looks like this.
 |
| Cyclist 16:9 aspect ratio 1024x576 pixels 1.08Mb |
The new image is 1024 x 576 pixels - quite low resolution even for an impressionist painting. My next task is to increase the resolution. This task would be even more important if I had asked DALL-E to generate a photographic quality image This article has some options and I tried both BigJpg.com and Upscaler because they both have the ability to test drive them before paying money. Both have failed miserably.
BigJpg can't finish an upscaling. With and without a free account, both attempts to upscale the image above ran to 95% done and then hung forever. If it ever finishes, I'll update this post. Well, after an hour it did finish but the download times out. My guess is the site didn't make any money and is now not supported. The owner is still happy to take your money, but you won't get anything for it. So that's a huge NO! from me.
Upscaler failed to produce an image and is also flagged as a malware site.
I tried Topaz last, because the article doesn't mention it offers a demo option. The product is a downloadable app that costs $159 right now. I downloaded it and quickly realized it does a brilliant job. The demo does not allow you to save the image, so I took a screen shot instead. It looks like this.
 |
| Cyclist 16:9 aspect ratio upscaled using Topaz |
You can see it has increased the resolution (you have to maximize both images to see the difference) but I don't really like what it did with the red flowers. I think I'm more comfortable restricting myself to asking DALL-E for painting styles that still look good in low resolutions.
Sticking with the low resolution image, here is the intro video I created for the 300k brevet.
DaVinci Resolve has an upscaler built in, but it adds a watermark in the free version. The paid version costs $300 and I haven't paid for it. It would make more sense for me to pay for DaVinci than to purchase Topaz.
Here's the same video using DaVinci Resolve's upscaling (please excuse the watermark). I think I'm going to have to buy a license for it. It's difficult to see the difference because of BlogSpot's video compression. So here are the two videos uploaded to YouTube.
No upscaling https://youtu.be/17N89x2GSQU
Upscaled with DaVinci Resolve https://youtu.be/KNaRxN3r-gE
