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Enhance Picture

Free AI-powered photo enhancer

AI photo enhancer — free, on your device

This page runs a real AI model — Real-ESRGAN, the same super-resolution network used in academic research — right in your browser. It reconstructs edges, texture and colour that blur, noise and compression stripped away, and upscales to 2× or 4× when you need more pixels. No account, no upload, no watermark, and the one-time download — the 4.9 MB model plus its runtime — is cached.

Drop a photo below — the AI pass starts on its own — and drag the split preview to compare.

  • Real-ESRGAN AI
  • Always free
  • No account
  • Up to 4× upscale
  • Runs on your device
  • No upload

Drop a picture here — AI enhancement starts on its own

JPG, PNG or WebP — up to 20 pictures at once

How to enhance a photo with AI

Three steps — the AI model runs on your device, free, with nothing uploaded.

  1. Add the photo you want the AI to enhance

    Drag a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the drop zone, tap Choose pictures to browse your device, or press Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac) to paste from the clipboard — screenshots, chat exports and old camera shots all work. Up to 20 photos in one batch, no file-size limit.

  2. Run the AI enhancer

    The AI pass starts on its own once the photo is in: the Real-ESRGAN super-resolution model, downloaded once with its runtime and cached (the model is 4.9 MB), processes your photo in overlapping tiles and rebuilds detail that blur, noise and compression destroyed. Choose 1× to clean up without enlarging, 2× for a balanced upscale, or 4× for maximum resolution.

  3. Compare and save

    Drag the split preview to see the AI result next to the original. Fine-tune brightness, contrast, colour or sharpness with the sliders if needed, then press Download enhanced — or Download all for the whole batch. Copy puts the result on your clipboard as a PNG.

Questions about the AI photo enhancer

What AI model does this photo enhancer use?
Real-ESRGAN — specifically the realesr-general-x4v3 checkpoint, a 1.2-million-parameter super-resolution network released under the BSD licence. It was trained on paired high-resolution and degraded images to reconstruct edges, texture and colour that compression, noise and downscaling remove. The model runs entirely on your device through WebGPU or WebAssembly, not on a remote server.
Is the AI photo enhancer really free?
Yes — no account, no watermark, no daily limit and no premium tier. Because the AI model runs on your own GPU or CPU, there is no per-image server cost to cover. Process one photo or a hundred in the same session at the same quality.
How is AI enhancement different from a regular photo filter?
Filters apply fixed transformations — a sharpening kernel, a contrast curve, a colour shift — and they cannot add detail that is not already in the pixels. Real-ESRGAN is a generative neural network that has learned what natural detail looks like. Given a blurry or compressed patch, it draws plausible texture and edges rather than just boosting what is there. The result is not the original scene recovered pixel-for-pixel, but it is measurably closer to a high-quality capture than any filter can get.
Does the AI work on all types of photos?
It handles most real-world photos well: portraits, landscapes, product shots, screenshots, scanned prints. Its strongest results come from images degraded by compression (chat forwards, low-quality JPEGs) or downscaling (thumbnails, web exports). Heavy motion blur and very small text or faces can come out slightly stylised because the model is guessing what was there — the split preview shows exactly what changed before you commit.
How long does the AI enhancement take?
On a device with WebGPU (most desktop Chrome, Edge and recent Firefox) the model runs on your GPU: a few seconds for a small photo, about half a minute for a 1920×1080 one. Without GPU acceleration it falls back to single-threaded WebAssembly and a full-size photo can take a minute or two — a progress bar and Cancel button keep that manageable. Safari, iPhone and iPad use the CPU path because WebKit's WebGPU stack is not yet reliable.
Can I choose how much the AI upscales?
Yes. The scale selector offers 1×, 2× and 4×. At 1× the AI cleans up noise, blur and compression artifacts without enlarging the photo — ideal when it is already the right size but looks degraded (a photo above 4 megapixels, or 0.7 MP without WebGPU, is read at that size and comes back smaller). At 2× you get double the width and height with reconstructed detail. At 4× the model runs at full native resolution for maximum upscaling. Internally the model always processes at 4× and derives the smaller outputs from that pass.
Do my photos get uploaded to a server?
No. Decoding, the AI pass and re-encoding all happen inside your browser tab. There is no upload endpoint — no photo, filename or pixel ever leaves your device. The only network traffic is the one-time download of the AI engine — the 4.9 MB model plus its runtime — cached afterward. Once it is in, enhancing needs no connection.
What is the difference between AI enhance and Auto levels?
Auto levels is a Canvas-based correction with no neural network: it stretches each colour channel to its full range, and the brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness sliders work the same way. It suits photos that are correctly sized but look flat, dark or washed out. AI enhance runs Real-ESRGAN to reconstruct detail at the pixel level, which handles blur, noise and compression far better but takes longer. The tool uses both: the AI pass runs first, then Auto levels and the sliders fine-tune its result.

How Real-ESRGAN enhances your photos

Traditional photo editors sharpen by boosting high-frequency edges and denoise by averaging neighbouring pixels. Both are blind — they apply the same math regardless of what the image contains. Real-ESRGAN is a convolutional neural network trained on millions of image pairs: a high-quality original and a version degraded with real-world compression, downscaling and noise. After training, the network has learned what natural detail — a strand of hair, a brick edge, a fabric weave — should look like at full quality. Given a degraded patch, it draws that detail back in rather than just amplifying what remains.

The model processes your photo in overlapping 128–256-pixel tiles at a native 4× pass. For 1× and 2× output it downsamples from that pass, so even a 1× cleanup benefits from the full-resolution reconstruction. On devices with WebGPU (most desktop Chrome, Edge and recent Firefox) the tiles run on the GPU and finish in seconds. Without GPU access the runtime falls back to WebAssembly on a single CPU thread — slower, but it still works everywhere and a progress bar keeps it transparent.

The AI pass is one half of the tool. The other half is instant corrections: auto levels stretch each colour channel to full range, fixing washed-out exposure in milliseconds. Brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness sliders apply on top, and the split preview lets you compare the combined result against the untouched original. Everything runs in your browser — no photo, filename or pixel is ever transmitted.

When to use AI vs. Auto levels

Not every photo needs a neural network. If the shot is correctly sized and focused but looks flat or dark — underexposed, low contrast, muted colour — Auto levels corrects that: it measures the histogram and stretches each colour channel, and the sliders add contrast, colour and sharpening. The AI pass still runs first — pick 1× clean up so it does not enlarge the photo.

AI enhance is worth the processing time when the photo has lost actual detail: JPEG artifacts from chat forwarding, noise from a low-light shot, softness from a small crop, or pixels missing because the source was a thumbnail. The model reconstructs what should be there rather than guessing from a filter kernel. For the best results, run the AI pass first at your target scale, then fine-tune exposure and colour with the sliders — they work on the AI result.

Need to target a specific output? The enhance picture resolution page presets the scale to 4× and shows exact dimensions. If the photo is already large enough and just needs cleaner quality, the enhance picture quality page runs the same AI at 1×. For a general starting point, the main picture enhancer opens at 2×.

Your photos stay on your device

The AI engine downloads to your browser once (the 4.9 MB model plus its runtime, cached). After that, every enhancement — decoding, the neural network pass, slider adjustments and re-encoding — runs locally. There is no server receiving your photos, no queue, no daily allowance and no file-size cap imposed by an upload form. Switch the network off once it has downloaded and the tool keeps working.