Enhance image quality without enlarging

How it works

1. Drop the picture you want cleaned up: a slightly soft photo, a scan of an old print, or an image that lost detail to heavy compression. Up to about 4 megapixels, for example 2048 × 2048 or 2560 × 1600.
2. Leave the output format alone unless you need a specific one. There is no size to choose: this page is fixed to the original size.
3. Press Enhance. The first time, the AI model and its runtime (about 5 MB) are downloaded; after that it starts straight away and works offline. The picture is cut into tiles and processed on several processor cores at the same time.
4. Download the result. Its name ends in -sharp, so it sits next to the original instead of overwriting it, and you can compare the two before you keep one.

Frequently asked questions

What does it actually change?

Edges get crisper, sensor noise and JPEG blocking are smoothed away, and fine texture is redrawn. The model enlarges the picture ×4 internally and the result is averaged back down to the original width and height, so the clean-up survives but the dimensions do not change.

Will it fix a blurry photo?

Not a truly blurry one. Motion blur, a shot that missed focus and detail the camera never captured cannot be recovered by this or any other tool; what you get back is a confident-looking guess. It works on pictures that are only slightly soft, and on scans and compressed images where the detail is there but muddy.

Why would I not just enlarge it?

Because a bigger file is often the wrong answer. If an image already has the pixels a form, a template or a website needs, enlarging it only makes it heavier. This page keeps the size and spends the model on quality. When you do need more pixels, use the ×2 and ×4 options on the main Upscale image page.

Does the file get bigger?

The pixel dimensions stay identical. The number of bytes can go up a little, because sharper detail costs more to encode than a smudge, especially for a JPEG that was heavily compressed to begin with. Run the result through Compress image if it has to stay under a limit.

Why does this page accept larger pictures than ×2 does?

Because the finished picture is the part that has to fit in your browser's memory. ×2 of a 2-megapixel photo is an 8-megapixel result, while enhancing a 4-megapixel photo stays at 4 megapixels, so the ceiling here is about 4 megapixels instead of about 2. It is not faster, though: the model still works at ×4 on every tile, so a 4-megapixel photo takes roughly twice as long as a 2-megapixel one.

Can I use it on text, documents or number plates?

No. The model invents plausible detail, so small letters can come back as different letters and a number plate can come back as a different number. Use it on pictures, not on anything that has to stay faithful. Black-and-white scans are kept neutral grey rather than picking up a colour cast.

Is my picture uploaded?

No. The model, Real-ESRGAN general-x4v3, is the same one the Upscale image page uses; it is downloaded to your browser once for both and runs on your own processor, so the photo stays on your device. A 2-megapixel image takes a while on an older laptop or a phone; the free plan covers 3 images per run, 20 MB each and 10 runs a day.