Recraft Creative Upscale Image

You feed it a small, soft image - usually a face - and it comes back bigger and suspiciously more detailed. That's the whole pitch: one input, one output, no prompt, no sliders. If you've got a 512px portrait that needs to look like it was shot at 2K, this is the fastest path you'll find in the node graph.

Before you go spending credits on it, understand what "creative" means here, because the name is doing real work. Upscaling comes in two flavours that get conflated constantly: adding pixels and adding detail. A Lanczos or ESRGAN pass adds pixels - it can't invent anything, which is usually what you want. Recraft's creative upscale is the other kind. It's generative. The hosted model looks at your image, understands the subject, and re-renders it at higher resolution, inventing plausible detail as it goes. The node description says it best: it focuses on refining small details and faces. Hair strands, eyelashes, fabric weave that never existed start to appear.

Contrast it with its sibling RecraftCrispUpscaleNode, which does the "sharper and cleaner" job. If your source is already detailed and just small, you want crisp, not creative - creative will change the image because that's its job. If your source is genuinely soft or damaged, creative is the one that rescues it.

How it works

It's a hosted partner node, not local inference. Your image gets uploaded to /proxy/recraft/images/creativeUpscale, Recraft's API does the work on their GPU, and the result is downloaded back into a tensor. ComfyUI handles the auth silently through your Comfy account, and the call is billed per image from your account credits. No model files, no VRAM, no ComfyUI/models folder involved.

The node takes a batch of images too - each image in your IMAGE batch is upscaled individually and recombined, with a progress bar. So batch-upscaling a folder of product shots works fine, just watch the bill.

Inputs and outputs

The full schema is two things:

• image - the IMAGE tensor to upscale
• IMAGE out - wire it into a Preview Image or Save Image node like any other image

There's nothing else to set, which is either liberating or frustrating depending on your personality. You get the company's tuned settings and no way to tweak them.

Getting it

It ships with ComfyUI core - no extension, nothing to install. You do need to be signed into a Comfy account with credits; if you're on Comfy Cloud you get a monthly allowance of partner-node credits, otherwise you buy them.

Where people get burned

• Faces change. This is generation, not interpolation. A creative upscale of a person's face can subtly (or not so subtly) re-render it. Don't run it on anything identity-critical and expect a pixel-perfect blow-up.
• Cost creeps up. It's one of the pricier Recraft calls, and it's per image. A 10-image batch is 10 billings.
• It's redundant for clean sources. If the image already has the detail you want, a local 4x ESRGAN or SeedVR2 does the same job for free and runs in milliseconds. Reach for the hosted creative pass when the source genuinely lacks detail - small, soft, low-res originals.

That last point is the real takeaway. The Recraft creative upscale is a great convenience tool for the "I found this 500px image and need it to not look like a potato" case, and it's genuinely good at faces. Just know you're paying for invented detail, and make sure that's what you want.