>>8079409Great work with the top/bottom expansion.
It's a shame you had to start with the recompressed JPEG (80% quality with 2x2 chroma subsampling) OR provided.
The original image on the artist's blog is 95% quality without chroma subsampling:
https://davedorman.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/dave-dorman-paints-frank-frazetta-tribute-in-this-step-by-step-post/It looks like you used waifu2x to upscale.
That works well for high contrast images with smooth color fills and sharp edges, particularly anime pictures.
However, it falls flat with anything grittier like a painting, and results in an image that's overly soft and smooth.
Real-ESRGAN with the 4x-UltraSharp model manages to maintain the grit and keep things sharp.
