João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he's always happy to talk about.
Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/
Stardock is one of the biggest companies in the business of customizing your Windows desktop, and it makes some of my favorite apps, like Start11 and Fences. Recently, the company came out with a new version of DeskScapes, its advanced wallpaper tool that makes it easy to find and apply effects to them to make your desktop look beautiful.
DeskScapes 2026's big headlining feature is the ability to generate, restyle, and upscale wallpapers locally, meaning there are no cloud AI models necessary here. You can edit as many images as you want and never worry about token usage or anything of the kind. That makes it even easier to create a desktop you love.
A major AI upgrade
Turns out old horses can learn new tricks
Let's start with the big headlining new feature, the AI capabilities in DeskScapes 2026. There are a few different tools that fall under this, so we can break them down one by one, starting with wallpaper generation. No matter where you start, though, you'll need to download a local AI model, which is going to take a good chunk of space on your computer. You can either use a model that mostly relies on your GPU, or one that combines the CPU and GPU and offers higher-quality results.
Generating a wallpaper is the least interesting part to me, but in fairness to the DeskScapes, it does work. I fed it a relatively simple prompt to generate a snowy forest with a lake, and I chose one of the image styles available from the model, and after a few minutes, I had a pretty nice wallpaper to work with. I ran this on a 12th-generation Intel laptop processor (which is around four years old) and no discrete graphics, so it took a fairly long time to get done, but most computers will probably get it done much more quickly.
AI Restyle is another one of the big AI features here, and it's cool that you can run it on your own images or pick out one of the wallpapers already available in the app and then modify it to a different style. I tried taking this photo available on DeskScapes, which looked beautiful but very blurry, even at high resolution. I converted it to an image using the more artistic-looking Tempera style, and the result turned out pretty nice.
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The final feature is AI upscaling, and this is much more straightforward. Here, AI simply tries to increase the resolution of a picture you give it, which might be useful for older photos and images in your library.
Since all of these features run locally, you do need some mildly powerful hardware to have a good experience. This 12th-gen Intel processor took a long time to generate images, and if I tried upscaling them to 4K, the process would sometimes just fail due to the hardware not being capable enough. Since around 2024, integrated graphics have become a lot more powerful, so you don't necessarily need a discrete GPU, but older laptops may struggle.
Effects are the most interesting part
Make your desktop more animated
One of the more interesting parts of DeskScapes to me is the animated effects you can apply to your wallpapers to make your desktop a little more lively. DeskScapes 2026 actually adds a couple of new effects to the range, and there are a ton of options to choose from, with some additional customization options to boot.
As an example, I took that image I generated above with the snowy forest, and I added a snow effect to it, which created a nice cohesive theme. Matching effects to specific pictures has a lot of potential, and you can also combine effects and even create a new preset so you can always apply those two (or more) effects together to a given image. Of course, you can bring in your own photos and add a little more life to them, whether it's snow, rain, water ripple effects, and much more. There's even a separate tool called DeskScapes DreamMaker, which lets you create your own animated effects, though this is a little more complex and not something I'm equipped to work with.
You can also apply global effects such as blurring your wallpaper, making it darker, or pixelating it. These effects even apply to the animations mentioned above, so things look fairly consistent. I have noticed that some effects may not properly be applied until you've set a new wallpaper, though, which seems to be some kind of bug.
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It's a great wallpaper source, too
Especially for animated ones
Even beyond the bells and whistles, DeskScapes is a pretty good source for all kinds of wallpapers. There are some beautiful images on there, and one thing that I also like is that you have extra control over how a background is applied. If a photo has a 16:9 aspect ratio but your screen has a different format, not only can you force the image to fill the screen (either by stretching or cropping), but if you choose to have the image cropped, you can choose to align the middle, top, or bottom of the image to get the most important elements in.
I also like that, for static wallpapers, there's a simple recolor option that can change the hue of certain parts of your image. This can mean changing the color entirely or just increasing or decreasing the saturation to achieve a specific effect, and I
But truly, the best part is being able to find animated wallpapers that feel much more lively, even before you add an animated effect on top of them. There are plenty of options here, too, from a simple spinning view of Earth to colorful blurry blobs. And of course, just like with static wallpapers, you can add animated effects on top of the background to have another layer of customization. I've always found it frustrating that Windows doesn't natively support animated desktop backgrounds, so this is a wonderful solution.
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Unsurprisingly, what you can't do is restyle or upscale animated backgrounds. That would naturally require a lot more power, which most PC users don't have.
If you find that you have a lot of wallpapers you like, you can also create "playlists" to cycle through them, plus DeskScapes makes it easy to organize the wallpapers you've downloaded and used.
Level up your Windows customization
DeskScapes is far from the only option for customizing your Windows wallpaper, and it's not the cheapest, either. But it does have some interesting features, and the new AI-powered additions running locally do make it stand out from the crowd a bit more. Like most Stardock apps, you can take it for a trial run for up to 30 days, so I'd say it's worth a look to see if you're interested in what it has to offer.
DeskScapes
OS Windows 11
Memory 8GB (recommended)
$10 at Stardock
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