FWIW, my post on the GOTD download page with the Aiarty Image Enhancer offer...
I've got thousands of old photos I'm scanning & then editing. Aiarty Image Enhancer 3.1 [current version is 3.5] can improve a photo, but not by much. Truth is however, there's no magic-seeming better alternative. Luminar Neo can make a very noticeable improvement, but when I crank up the settings to achieve that, I have to limit it to just parts of the photo or it actually looks worse. The same can be said for Photoshop's Restoration Neural Filter. Topaz Denoise AI does work, but it's no longer available as a standalone product -- you have to buy the full package -- which I personally don't feel is worth it. The latest AI from Google, Nano Banana Pro, can attempt to improve focus or sharpness, with the caveats that it doesn't always work well, can alter the photo, and you have to upload the photo, which can be a deal breaker if you have very low upload bandwidth, e.g., cable broadband.
That said, Aiarty Image Enhancer does do very well with upscaling or enlarging. The latest AI versions from OpenAI & Google etc. can produce and/or edit larger, high resolution photos, but they're not available everywhere, have usage caps unless you pay to subscribe, and if/when editing, you have that upload gotcha. Older models, and *I think* most on-device models, work with smaller 1024 pixel square windows. If/when editing, say replacing or adding something to a photo, if the size is greater than 1024 square it's simply stretched to fit the rest of the photo. That means visually it's obviously lower resolution than the rest of the photo. Upscaling the entire photo can fix that. And as a bonus, unlike the big names like OpenAI & Google, in my experience Aiarty Image Enhancer doesn't change anything. With Nano Banana for example, a person's face, clothes, hair, & the background, all are subject to alteration.
The GOTD download is 435MB because it includes the MAC setup file -- the PC setup file is 320MB. The program's folder once installed is 930MB. The app can use several different models, which are downloaded the 1st time you use one. The 2 I used were about 80MB each and stored in ProgramData\ Airty\. To my knowledge LM Studio [lmstudio.ai/] is the only interface or way to use AI on your PC/laptop that can use the integrated GPU that's built into many AMD & Intel CPUs. Everything else either uses online servers or a discreet GPU or graphics card, and that includes Aiarty Image Enhancer. And the performance of on-device AI depends on that GPU and the amount of dedicated RAM it has available. As you'd expect, there's a big difference in AI performance between the bottom/cheap & top/expensive graphics cards.
