Which M16 picture is better?

starnet

Here is a tricky question. This is a standard 2MP S50 JPEG picture of M16, the Eagle Nebula, with the Pillars of Creation visible in the center, 15 minutes exposure, taken from a Bortle 9 area:

This is exactly the same picture, upscaled to 8MP and with some noise removed using a free online AI service, no Siril or PixInsight were harmed in the making of this image. Also, this is based on the JPEG, not the RAW FIT file:

Which picture do you think is better? Is the second one even real? There is no more information in it compared with the first one. Should ZWO provide a denoise and upsample AI option to make the final output look better? If yes should it be free or would you be willing to pay for it?

starnet

To be clear, while the two images look the same size in this post, the first one is 1080x1920, the second one is 2160x3840, so it is not just less noise but 4x as many pixels. Even the watermark text is sharper and less noisy. As compressed JPEG files, the first one is 1790KB while the second one is 3370KB. I had to further compress the last one down to 1907KB because there seems to be a 2MB limit on uploading images here.

Brille

What online AI service has done this? Was it based on a 8bit JPG? Whta was your prompt or whatever to generate this image?

starnet

This is based on 8-bit JPEG, so I assume starting from the FIT file would be even better. I asked Perplexity.AI "how can I denoise and increase the resolution of an image using AI?" and the first thing it recommended was https://www.upscale.media/blog/high-resolution-ai-images which seems to be free and easy to use, you upload your image, select 2x upscaling and Enhance Quality and download back the result. They have a free plan with 3 images per month to try the service and both a monthly subscription and a pay as you go plan. There are a lot of other options out there of course.