Participating Frequently

Detail-Preserving Upscale produces visible seam lines on fine regular textures at 116% and above

Forum|Forum|3 days ago
July 21, 2026
1 reply
27 views

Issue

When applying the Detail-Preserving Upscale effect to a layer containing fine regular textures, visible seam-like boundaries appear once the Upscale value reaches 116% or higher.

The image appears as though it has been divided into sections.

Example texture used for reproduction:
Grid effect
- Grid Size: Width Slider
- Width: 2
- Border: 2

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a new composition.
2. Create a new solid layer.
3. Apply the Grid effect.
4. Set Grid Size to "Width Slider", Width to 2, and Border to 2.
5. Apply the Detail-Preserving Upscale effect.
6. Increase the Upscale value to 116% or higher.

Expected Result

The image should scale uniformly without introducing any visible boundaries.

Actual Result

No artifacts appear up to an Upscale value of 115%.

The artifacts appear consistently once the Upscale value reaches 116% or higher.

Visible seam-like boundaries appear, making the image look as though it has been divided into sections.

Changing any of the effect parameters does not resolve the issue.

Additional Information

- Reproduced in After Effects 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
- Reproduced with both Mercury Software Only and Mercury GPU Acceleration.
- The seams are also present in rendered PNG output, not only in the Composition viewer.
- Another user has confirmed the same behavior on macOS, suggesting the issue is not specific to Windows.

English is not my native language, so I may use machine translation for replies. Thank you for your understanding.

Nishu Kushwaha

Community Manager

Hi saku, thanks for the thorough testing across versions. After looking at this, I am not sure if it's a bug. it's a known limitation of edge-preserving upscale algorithms rather than a defect in AE.

Detail-Preserving Upscale analyzes the image in local regions to detect edges and apply different scaling logic to edges vs. flat areas. When the input contains very fine regular patterns like your 2px grid (a pattern that repeats every 4 pixels), the algorithm's analysis regions can interact with the pattern's regularity and become visible as seams at certain scale factors.

The fact that this reproduces identically across five versions of AE (2020–2025) also supports the algorithm's consistent behavior.

I'll request the product team to look into it correct if the information given by me is incorrect.

Better options are:

- Use the layer's Scale property, instead of the Detail-Preserving Upscale effect.

- For very high quality upscales, use Photoshop's Preserve Details 2.0 and re-import.

Hope that helps explain what you're seeing.

Thanks,

Nishu

S

sakuAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for your detailed explanation and for taking the time to look into this.

Your explanation about the local-region analysis makes sense.

One thing I'm still curious about is why the seams appear consistently at exactly 116%, while they are completely absent at 115%.

If this is an algorithmic limitation, is there any technical reason why the behavior changes at that specific threshold?

I appreciate you forwarding this to the product team, and I look forward to hearing their thoughts on this.

S

sakuAuthor

Participating Frequently

I performed some additional testing and found another interesting threshold.

The checkerboard-like artifacts remain visible up to an Upscale value of 247%, but disappear again at 248% and above.

This seems to indicate that the behavior changes at another specific threshold as well.

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