My Enhance button made the model plate worse
TL;DR I added an “Enhance” button to my photo viewer, backed by RealESRGAN running in ComfyUI on the Mac Studio. Its stated job was to help me read model plates and serial numbers in blurry surplus photos. I benched it against a plate where I knew the right answer. At small glyph sizes it did the opposite of its job: crisp, confident, wrong text. G1312B-60050 came back as 01D12B-(0)00. It is not a bad model pick. Four different upscalers garbled the same lines the same way. The usual advice (pre-upscale with a classical filter first) changed nothing. The failure is the generative prior, not a starved input. What I do now: the original pixels stay the source of truth, there is a text-safe sharpen view that invents nothing, and the AI view composites real pixels back over anything that looks like fine detail. A wrong model number off an enhanced photo is a wrong comp, which is a wrong bid. This one was worth catching before it spent money. Why I wanted it The most valuable pixels in a surplus lot photo are the smallest ones. The difference between a generic median price and an exact-model price is often a part number on a data plate, shot from a few feet away at a resolution where a 13-point label is about twelve pixels tall. I already pull the full gallery for every lot and archive it, so I had the best pixels the seller provided. They just were not enough for some plates. ...