Upscale product photos 4× for zoom-ready listings

Shoppers cannot touch the product, so they judge it from the photo. They zoom in on seams, buttons, the grain of wood and the weave of fabric. If the image is small, the store either shows it small or stretches it. An ordinary stretch gives a soft, smeared look that reads as low quality, even when the product is good.

Small images usually come from a supplier who only has catalogue-size files, an old shoot exported for a website years ago, or a photo saved from an email. The first two are often clean and simply small. That is the case a 4× upscale handles best.

Upscale 4× makes the photo four times wider and four times taller, so it has sixteen times as many pixels. A normal resize fills those pixels by averaging neighbours, which is why enlarged photos look blurry. Upscale 4× is two networks: one rebuilds sharp edges at the new size, and a second adds fine texture so surfaces do not look plastic.

It is great for photos of objects, people, places and nature. It is not a label reader. Small text in the photo stays as soft as it was in the original, because the model does not guess letters. If the label matters, photograph it close up or add it as text in your listing.

The input limit is 5 MP, and results can be up to 80 MP. A typical 800 x 800 supplier image (0.64 MP) becomes 3200 x 3200.

Work out the target size before you start. If your store displays best at about 2000 pixels, a 500-pixel image needs 4× and a 250-pixel image needs 8×. Upscale 8× accepts photos up to 1.25 MP and uses 2 credits per photo, so keep it for really small sources.

If 4× overshoots, reduce the result in any editor. Going far beyond the platform's maximum does not help: the platform resizes it down again, and some reject files above a pixel or file-size limit. Shopify's help centre, for example, lists 5000 x 5000 pixels or 25 megapixels and under 20 MB.

If the photo is already a decent size and only a little soft or grainy, it may not need enlarging at all: Enhance repairs mild softness, noise and compression at the same size.

The result can only be as good as the input. Ask the supplier for the original file instead of the one on their website. Avoid screenshots of product pages, which add their own blur and scaling.

If the only copy you have is grainy or blocky, run Enhance on it first, at the same size. Then upscale the enhanced file. Upscaling first would enlarge the grain and blocks together with the product.

PhotoRescue accepts JPG, PNG and WebP. If your phone saves HEIC, export a JPG first. Free uploads can be up to 3 MB and 8 MP; paid uploads up to 20 MB and 30 MP.

Open the original and the result side by side at the same display size. Zoom into the parts shoppers care about: label text, logos, the edge where the product meets the background, and repeating patterns such as knits or perforations.

The added fine texture is plausible, not a record of the exact surface. If anything looks different from the physical product, do not publish that image. Free results carry a watermark and are meant for this check. A paid plan gives watermark-free files and batches of up to 50 photos.

If the camera missed focus or moved, enlarging gives you a larger blurry photo. If the product fills only a small part of the frame, cropping and upscaling shows how little detail is really there. In both cases a reshoot is better.