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I'm looking for software, namely a Photoshop plugin, or any other software that would integrate with Photoshop on macOS to quickly and easily upscale small low-res images to much larger images with the highest resulting quality, that is with maximally smooth gradients while preserving edges and avoiding visual noise.

One plugin capable of this that is only available on Windows is Redfield Perfectum, which is btw an extremely old piece of software. The third image below was made with Redfield Perfectum.

<code>enter image description here</code>

If there's absolutely no Photoshop software available for this on Mac, please let me know if it's possible to achieve this effect with standard Photoshop features.

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  • What have you tried in Photoshop? Here's a little rescaling tutorial without plugins: petapixel.com/2014/05/03/… Good enough?
    – AAGD
    Nov 9, 2017 at 8:02
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    There was Mac software for this 15 years ago. Since that time, with the addition of things like Content Awareness.. Photoshop has gotten as good or better than any of the fractal scaling plug ins out there. Can you explain why Photoshop itself is insufficient?
    – Scott
    Dec 10, 2017 at 14:32

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There is no way to do this without quality loss. The best alternative I've come across recently is a free web service that uses machine learning https://letsenhance.io/

Depending on your image, the results can be a lot better than what Photoshop and similar software can do. But as long as you are working with raster images and not vectors, it will not be perfect

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We are not in equal situation with the questioner because we have his original image only as highly compressed JPG which is full of compression artefacts. But nothing prevents to try. In Photoshop you can enlarge the image with Image > Resize > bicubic smooth resampling. The result in 400% is so blurry that it's not useful as is.

But you can clean and sharpen the result by adding mode blur with Filters > Blur > Smart Blur. It doesn't smudge stuff by mixing it over detected edges:

enter image description here

In the left there's only resampling to 400%. In the right smart blur has been applied. I inserted the setting dialog to the screenshot.

This surely kills also those fine details which are judged to be noise (=below treshold). The result resembles the output from low cost cameras where the software tries to make subjectively good looking JPGs from quite hopelessly noisy raw images.

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What the op asked (or the result in his question) was made with Surface Blur in Photoshop.

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