Recently, after changing my desktop wallpaper, I noticed a slight issue. It was a 1920×1080 image that had to be scaled up to Fill my 1920×1200 secondary monitor, which, as you expect, resulted in loss of sharpness. Since it’s a painted artwork, expanding the canvas to 1200p and filling the blank parts was not possible.
I didn’t want to “Fit” the image to avoid black stripes along the top and bottom edge, so I decided to revisit one of my favorite GMIC plugins – the CNN2x.
Turns out, the whole process was a lot more challenging than I expected… The key was to balance the sharpness so that no halo or similar artefacts are visible. I also had to do some antialiasing to smooth jagged edges, but in the end… it worked. Upscaling 1080p to 4K seems to work really well for making 1200p capable wallpapers
So here’s what I’m currently using: (it’s the Monstercat 024 - Vanguard compilation album artwork edited in darktable, one of my favorite artworks of the original 001-030 compilations)
As I mainly use Hyprland I have no wallpaper as a window is always fullscreen or tiled. I do have a slideshow that plays for 30 minutes or so with a lot of my photos when I’m inactive. I use an LG C4 so it’s important for the screen to either be off when not in use or displaying varied content and not a static image due to OLED burn in. This is a great way to rediscover your photography and see photos that you may not even remember anymore
I just select black and I am done. My oldest laptop still has a desktop background with a tiled poorly drawn graph that I drew in 2 seconds for a PIXLS post. I am as low-fi as one can get.
I use a slideshow with different wallpapers for dark and light mode. Some are my own photos but mostly from wallhaven. I’ve sometimes used artistic filters to resize smaller images, which ultimately work for me.
Wow, that’s a really nice wallpaper! It’s pretty much the style I have used past 5 or 6 years – a minimalistic mountainous landscape (mostly) during a sunset. Firewatch game screenshots are a gold mine for such images.
Well, that’s what I used until this June
I really liked low-contrast colorful images, now I think it’s time to switch things up a little
Yeah, OLEDs are sensitive… On my phone I switched to a mostly black fan-edit of another Monstercat compilation album artwork, besides the obvious reason… also to take advantage of black color saving some power (and not to flashbang myself at night)
I try to keep icons away from the subjects of the wallpaper, but as you may have noticed, I have barely any icons on the desktop, so no big deal most of the time
If icon visibility was a problem for me, I think I’d go for a minimal background like this one:
I also have zero desktop icons. I use either key commands or other ways to start applications (e.g., menu items or menu commands). But mostly key commands. This is with the Awesome window manager.
The key was to balance the sharpness so that no halo or similar artefacts are visible. I also had to do some antialiasing to smooth jagged edges, but in the end… it worked. Upscaling 1080p to 4K seems to work really well for making 1200p capable wallpapers 
