Image editing
Sharpen Image
Bring out edges and fine detail in a photo without uploading it anywhere.
Processed on your device — nothing is sent anywhere.
Works in your browser. No account needed.
Frequently asked questions
What amount should I use?
Start low. Around 15–30 suits portraits and photos that were downscaled for the web; 40, the default, is a general-purpose setting for slightly soft phone and camera shots; 50–70 helps text in scans, screenshots and product details. Above about 70 most photos show bright outlines along edges and gritty noise in flat areas. Press and hold the preview often — your eye adapts to sharpening quickly.
Can sharpening fix a blurry or out-of-focus photo?
Only slightly soft ones. Sharpening raises contrast along edges that are already there, so it rescues a photo that is a little soft from a cheap lens, a downscale or light compression. It cannot rebuild detail lost to real motion blur or missed focus — if an edge is smeared over many pixels, sharpening just makes a harder-looking smear. For those, an AI photo enhancer or upscaler that reconstructs detail is the better tool.
How does the sharpening work?
Each pixel is compared with its four direct neighbours — above, below, left and right — and the difference is amplified: a pixel brighter than its surroundings gets brighter, a darker one gets darker. The amount slider sets how strongly. Flat areas such as sky or a wall have little difference to amplify and barely change, while edges and texture gain contrast. Transparency in PNG files is left untouched.
Why does the preview look stronger than the downloaded file?
The preview is sharpened on a copy scaled to at most 1000 pixels on its long side, while the download is sharpened at full resolution. The effect works at the scale of single pixels, so on a large photo it is finer when you view the whole image on screen. Open the downloaded file at 100% zoom to judge it; if it looks too subtle, download again with a higher amount.
Should I sharpen before or after resizing?
After. Downscaling averages pixels together and softens detail, so sharpening first is partly undone. The usual workflow is to crop and resize to the final size, then sharpen lightly as the last step before export — what photographers call output sharpening. Sharpening before upscaling is also a bad idea, because the upscaler enlarges the halos along with the detail.
Should I download PNG or JPG?
PNG is lossless and keeps transparency, so choose it for screenshots, graphics, and anything you will edit further. JPG makes a much smaller file for photos you are about to share; transparent areas become white. Avoid repeatedly sharpening and re-saving the same JPG — each round amplifies the compression artifacts from the last.
About this tool
Drop in an image, drag the amount slider, and edges and textures become crisper in the preview as you move it. Press and hold the preview to flip back to the original for a direct before-and-after comparison, then download a PNG or JPG. The preview runs on a scaled-down copy so the slider stays smooth; the download is processed at the image’s full pixel size.
What sharpening helps: phone photos that came out a little soft, pictures that lost crispness after being resized for a website or a listing, scanned documents and receipts where the text looks fuzzy, screenshots that were scaled, and product photos that need more definition in fabric, wood grain or print. What it does not help: heavy motion blur, a subject that is clearly out of focus, or a tiny image that needs to be made larger — that last one is a job for an upscaler.
Things that go wrong with too much sharpening: light halos along dark edges (visible around hair, horizons and text), noise in shadows and skies turning gritty, JPEG compression blocks becoming visible, and skin looking rough. If you see any of these, back the amount off until they disappear. Faces generally tolerate less sharpening than buildings, landscapes or text.
Everything runs in your browser on your own device: the image is not uploaded, there is no size quota, and nothing is kept after you close the page. Very large photos — 50 megapixels and more — take a moment longer to download because every pixel is processed at full resolution.