Auto
A safe middle setting: auto levels on, mild contrast and saturation, moderate sharpening. Good first try when you are not sure what is wrong with the image.
Tools Image Enhancer
Tools
Current tool: Image Enhancer
Image Enhancer - Sharpen and Clean Up Photos Online
Fix flat, soft, or noisy images with auto levels, sharpening, and noise reduction, then enlarge up to 4x. Everything runs locally in this browser tab.
- No upload, no sign-up
- No watermark on the output
- Original resolution or up to 4x
What this image enhancer actually does
Most images that look bad are not missing detail — they are missing contrast. A photo shot through glass, a screenshot scaled down and back up, a document photographed under a desk lamp: in all three cases the pixels are there, but they occupy a narrow slice of the tonal range and the edges have been softened along the way.
This photo enhancer works on exactly that. Auto levels finds the darkest and brightest pixels actually present and stretches them back to full range. Sharpening rebuilds the edge contrast that resizing and compression rounded off. Noise reduction removes the speckle that appears when a phone pushes ISO in dim light. Enlargement then rescales the result up to 4x.
It is not an AI upscaler, and it does not claim to be. Nothing here invents detail that was not captured. That is a deliberate trade: a browser tool that handles a 12-megapixel photo in about a second — noise reduction roughly doubles that — with no upload, no account, and no queue, instead of a model that needs your file sitting on someone else’s server.
Photo enhancer or screenshot cleanup: which preset to use
The presets differ in more than strength — they turn different things on, because a screenshot and a photograph fail in different ways.
Photo
Tuned for camera and phone pictures. Stronger colour and contrast lift, gentler sharpening so skin and sky do not pick up halos.
Screenshot
Strong sharpening for text and interface edges, with auto levels and saturation left alone — a UI screenshot has deliberate brand colours, and stretching them changes the design.
Document
For scans and photographed paper. Noise reduction removes the grain of the paper, high contrast drives the text darker and the page whiter, and saturation comes down to cancel the colour cast from room lighting.
What each control changes
Open the advanced settings to adjust these individually. They are applied in a fixed order, which is why the result is stable when you change one thing at a time.
Auto levels
Measures the actual tonal range and stretches it to full black and full white. This is what makes a hazy or washed-out photo look immediately better. It is turned off in the screenshot preset because it also changes flat brand colours.
Sharpen
Unsharp masking: the image is compared with a blurred copy, and the difference is added back as edge contrast. A threshold keeps flat areas untouched so noise does not get amplified along with detail. Push it too far and you get bright halos along high-contrast edges.
Reduce noise
A median filter that replaces each pixel with the middle value of its neighbours. It removes isolated speckles while keeping edges intact, unlike blurring which softens everything. It runs before sharpening so the noise is gone before edges get enhanced. It is also the slowest step: on a 12-megapixel photo it roughly doubles the processing time.
Brightness, contrast, saturation
Standard tonal adjustments applied after auto levels. Useful for taste, or to recover an image that auto levels pushed slightly too far.
Enlarge
Rescales the result 2x, 3x, or 4x using high-quality browser interpolation. Sharpening is applied after enlargement, because interpolation softens the image and sharpening first would waste the effect.
How to enhance an image
Everything happens in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no queue to wait in.
- Drop a JPG, PNG, or WebP onto the tool, or pick one from your device.
- Choose a preset, or open the advanced settings to control levels, sharpening, noise reduction, and enlargement.
- Press Enhance image and compare the result against the original.
- Download the enhanced image. There is no watermark and no account required.
What an enhancer cannot fix
Detail that was never captured cannot be recovered. A face that is twelve pixels wide in the original will still be twelve pixels of information after a 4x enlargement — larger, smoother, but not more detailed. Any tool promising otherwise is generating a plausible face, not revealing yours.
Motion blur and severe defocus are also out of reach here. Sharpening raises the contrast of edges that exist; it cannot reconstruct an edge that was smeared across twenty pixels during the exposure.
Heavy JPEG artefacts are a partial case. Noise reduction softens the blocking a little, but sharpening will make the block boundaries more visible, not less. If an image is badly compressed, start from a better source file rather than trying to repair the compressed copy.
A useful order of operations when an image looks wrong and you are not sure why: run Auto first and see what changes. If the result suddenly looks contrasty and alive, the problem was tonal range and you are done. If it looks the same but still soft, raise the sharpening. If raising the sharpening brings out speckle in flat areas, turn on noise reduction and sharpen again. Only reach for brightness and saturation at the end, to taste.
Common questions
Is this an AI photo enhancer?
No. It uses classical image processing — histogram stretching, unsharp masking, median filtering, and high-quality interpolation. That means it is fast, works offline in your browser, and never uploads your file, but it also does not invent detail the way a generative model does.
Are my images uploaded to a server?
No. The processing runs inside this page, in a Web Worker on your own device. Nothing is sent anywhere, which matters for client photos, ID documents, and anything unreleased.
Will there be a watermark?
No. The download is the enhanced image at full resolution, with no watermark and no account required.
Which formats are supported?
JPG, PNG, and WebP for both input and output. Transparency is preserved when you keep PNG or WebP as the output format.
Why does my enlarged image look soft?
Enlargement interpolates between existing pixels, so the result is inherently softer than a native-resolution image. Raise the sharpening — it is applied after enlargement precisely to counteract this.
Why do bright outlines appear along edges?
That is a sharpening halo, and it means the sharpen amount is too high for this image. Lower it. Photos generally need less sharpening than screenshots because their edges are naturally softer.
What happened to the old upscale page?
It now redirects here. That tool only enlarged images; this page keeps the same 2x, 3x, and 4x enlargement and adds the levels, sharpening, and noise reduction that actually make an enlarged image look better.
Related tools
Once the image looks right, these run in the browser too. image compressor · image converter
🔒 Your privacy is our priority
Your photos are never uploaded to our servers. All image editing happens locally in your browser for complete privacy protection and security.