Krea Enhance Guide: Upscale and Sharpen AI Images

Krea Enhance does two jobs at once. It enlarges an image, and it regenerates detail while doing so, which is why a blurry 1024-pixel render can come out as a crisp file large enough for a poster. That second job is also the risk: the model is inventing texture, and if you let it invent too freely you get a different picture. This guide explains what the controls do, how to choose between a faithful and a creative enhancement, and how to get a clean export at the end.

What Enhance actually does

A traditional upscaler stretches pixels and sharpens edges. It cannot add information that was never there, so a soft image becomes a large soft image. Enhance is a generative upscaler: it looks at the source, works out what the content probably is, and redraws it at the new size with plausible fine detail such as skin pores, fabric weave, leaf edges and brick texture.

That approach is excellent for:

• Taking a generated image to print size without visible softness.
• Rescuing low-resolution references, screenshots or old photos.
• Giving a Realtime canvas sketch the detail it never had (see our Realtime canvas guide).
• Cleaning compression artefacts from images that have been through social media.

It is weaker where accuracy matters more than beauty: faces that must match a real person, logos, small text, technical drawings and product details a client will inspect. Those can all be enhanced, but with the creative controls held down and the result checked closely.

Choosing a resolution

Enhance offers a choice of output sizes, from a modest increase up to very large files. Bigger is not automatically better. Start from the final use and work backwards:

1. Web and social. A 2x enhancement is usually plenty. Platforms recompress anyway, and extra pixels are wasted.
2. Presentations and large screens. Aim for roughly 4K on the long edge.
3. Print. Divide the intended print width in inches by 300 to get the pixels you need per inch, or follow the printer’s specification. An A3 poster wants more than a postcard.
4. Cropping later. If you plan to crop, enhance to the size the crop needs, not the size of the whole image.

Very large outputs take longer, cost more credits and give the model more room to invent. If you need the largest sizes, run a mid-size pass first, check it, then enhance again from that result rather than jumping straight from a small source.

Clarity versus creativity

The two most important controls sit on a single trade-off, whatever the current labels call them. One pushes towards faithful sharpening of what is already there; the other lets the model add and reinterpret detail.

• Low creativity, high clarity. The image stays recognisably the same. Edges sharpen, noise drops, texture is modest. Use this for portraits of real people, products, anything with text, and client work where the approved image must not change.
• Mid creativity. Noticeably richer detail in skin, hair, foliage and fabric. Good for generated art, landscapes and illustration where a little invention is welcome.
• High creativity. The model repaints freely. Faces can change, patterns can shift, new objects can appear in textures. Use it only when the source is so poor that fidelity is already lost, or when you want a stylised result.

Some versions of Enhance also let you add a short prompt to steer the invented detail, and a strength or similarity setting that caps how far the result may drift from the source. If these exist in your interface, a one-line prompt describing the subject ('portrait of a man in a wool coat, natural skin texture') helps the model guess right.

Settings at a glance

Names and ranges change between releases; these are the controls to look for.

Try it

Upload a soft or small image of a textured subject, such as a knitted jumper, a stone wall or a leafy garden. If your interface offers a prompt field, use this.

Close-up of a hand-knitted wool jumper in oatmeal and rust, natural daylight, fine fibre texture, realistic fabric detail, no added objects

Run once at low creativity and once at mid creativity, then view both at 100% next to the original. Note where the mid version invented stitches that were never there. That comparison tells you the ceiling for that kind of image, and you can reuse the settings on similar work.

Checking and exporting

Enhance results look impressive at fit-to-screen and can hide problems at full size. Before you export:

1. Zoom to 100% and check faces, hands, text, straight lines and repeating patterns. These are where generative upscalers slip.
2. Compare with the original side by side. If a client approved the original, anything that moved is a problem, not an improvement.
3. Re-run with lower creativity if detail has drifted. It is faster than retouching.
4. Export in the right format. PNG for graphics, text and anything with flat colour; high-quality JPEG for photographs headed to the web; the printer’s requested format for print.
5. Keep the pre-enhance file. If the brief changes, you will want to enhance the approved image again with different settings, not enhance the enhancement.

Record the model and settings alongside the export. When a client asks for a slightly larger version six months later, matching the look depends on knowing what you did the first time.