Clarity Upscaler - The Sharpness Setting

The Original Image I do like this image, but in my opinion, it's a little rough. That's common for an output from GPT 1.5 Medium. As an exercise, I thought I could finally explore the rest of the Clarity Upscaler's features. My first thought was to try improving the sharpness. The Wrong Path First (oops) Upscale Attempt: 1 When you're not upscaling a human face, you can usually get away with a higher creativity. I set mine to 0.35. For humans, I typically try to stay close to 0.15. Since sharpness was my goal, I wrote a prompt specifically for that. I also set the sharpness setting to 5. Perhaps the prompt and the sharpness setting will overdo the result I'm looking for 🤷‍♂️. Settings Prompt: "Improve the details of everything, sharper coin shapes, brick edges, dragon scales" Negative Prompt: "change colors, " Scale Factor: 2 Scheduler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras Creativity: 0.35 Seed: -1 (random) Resemblance: 0.6 Handfix: Disabled Dynamic (HDR): 6 Sharpness: 5 Num Inference Steps: 18 Result The result from this attempt is terrible. The effect on the dragon's head is the worst, but all the details have been mangled. Notice the little dragon where the main dragon's claws used to be. This is a classic case of "creativity setting is too high". Upscale Attempt: 2 This is typically the point where I reduce the creativity, and likely that is what I should do based on the hallucinations in the first attempt, but I have little experience with any of the other settings. The only one I changed was sharpness, so my plan is to reduce it progressively back to 0 (the default), just to see what happens. In this attempt, I set it from 5 down to 2.5. Settings Prompt: "Improve the details of everything, sharper coin shapes, brick edges, dragon scales" Negative Prompt: "change colors, " Scale Factor: 2 Scheduler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras Creativity: 0.35 Seed: -1 (random) Resemblance: 0.6 Handfix: Disabled Dynamic (HDR): 6 Sharpness: 2.5 Num Inference Steps: 18 Result This result shows a little improvement. I can start seeing the dragon's teeth a little better now. Unless it's my imagination (very possible), I think the treasure is getting slightly better. The number of mini dragons has increased, and now, some of the treasure looks like a shield instead. I'm pretty confident we are on the wrong path here. Upscale Attempt: 3 The previous attempt demonstrated no significant change. It's a pretty safe bet that Sharpness did not cause the dramatic change in the image. We'll use this coming attempt to give us a baseline for what the image looks like with a creativity of 0.35 and no other changes. Settings Prompt: "Improve the details of everything, sharper coin shapes, brick edges, dragon scales" Negative Prompt: "change colors, " Scale Factor: 2 Scheduler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras Creativity: 0.35 Seed: -1 (random) Resemblance: 0.6 Handfix: Disabled Dynamic (HDR): 6 Sharpness: 0 Num Inference Steps: 18 Result Well, as predicted, there is no improvement at all, and even more mini dragons. If it wasn't already clear, sharpness was irrelevant. The Right Path (hopefully) Upscale Attempt: 4 We are at all defaults and the creativity set to a conservative 0.15. Settings Prompt: "Improve the details of everything, sharper coin shapes, brick edges, dragon scales" Negative Prompt: "change colors, " Scale Factor: 2 Scheduler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras Creativity: 0.15 Seed: -1 (random) Resemblance: 0.6 Handfix: Disabled Dynamic (HDR): 6 Sharpness: 0 Num Inference Steps: 18 Result The result is much better. We see an image with all the details of the original, but clearer. I think that because the image is so detail-rich, we require a much lower creativity to prevent hallucination. This normally would be enough for me. Since we started on sharpness, let's play with that setting more. Will the sharpness have a noticeable effect? Will it make the image better or worse. Upscale Attempt: 5 We'll start again at a sharpness of 5. It's the midpoint, so we should be able to see some effect, and determine if it needs more or less. Settings Prompt: "Improve the details of everything, sharper coin shapes, brick edges, dragon scales" Negative Prompt: "change colors, " Scale Factor: 2 Scheduler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras Creativity: 0.15 Seed: -1 (random) Resemblance: 0.6 Handfix: Disabled Dynamic (HDR): 6 Sharpness: 5 Num Inference Steps: 18 Result I can see a definite change. Specifically looking at the ridge from its forehead to snout. The detail is definitely sharper there. You can also see a noticeable improvement in the stained-glass, the stone-work, and the treasure. However, since the change is hard to notice easily, It's entirely possible that it's related to the variability of the creativity setting, not the sharpness. Upscale Attempt: 6 I bumped the sharpness up to 10 (there is no 11). If this setting has an effect it would be reasonable to assume that both attempts are showing signs of changes in sharpness. Settings Prompt: "Improve the details of everything, sharper coin shapes, brick edges, dragon scales" Negative Prompt: "change colors, " Scale Factor: 2 Scheduler: DPM++ 3M SDE Karras Creativity: 0.15 Seed: -1 (random) Resemblance: 0.6 Handfix: Disabled Dynamic (HDR): 6 Sharpness: 5 Num Inference Steps: 18 Result Everything is quite noticeably sharper. I don't think this is a result of the creativity setting. Final Thoughts I was hoping to show the effects of the Sharpness setting in the Clarity Upscaler. Due to a preconceived notion, I took a detour into the Creativity setting, throwing off what I was looking for. It became evident pretty quickly that I had taken a wrong turn. Rather than hiding that mistake, I figured it would be a useful lesson to how sensitive that Creativity setting really is. Next time, I'll dive into one of the other settings. If you have any preferences to which setting I should go after next, let me know in the comments.