Each row is a failure class this photo enhancer was benchmarked against before the page went up.
Cheap paper and forty summers leave a print flat, grainy and soft. The photo enhancer rebuilds edge and grain structure while the scratches stay exactly where they are — it repairs the picture, not the history.
Soft focus is the failure a resize can never undo — enlarge soft pixels, get bigger soft pixels. Of the four damage types on our bench, this is where the photo enhancer pulled furthest ahead.
Every forward re-compresses: blocking along edges, mottled sky, smeared skin. It is the class where our measurements put the free-tier photo enhancer ahead of the paid one — blocks out, nothing invented in.
Faces punish a photo enhancer twice: everyone knows what skin should look like, and artefacts land where people look first. On our compressed-portrait test the default stayed clean, not inventive.
Nothing gets repainted. The photo enhancer reads what survived — edge direction, grain, the shape of a blocked-out region — and reconstructs the detail those pixels imply, at four times the frame size. That is why softness, noise and compression blocking come out, and why scratches and torn corners stay: damage that is picture content, not lost signal, is left alone. We measured that, scoring four degraded photos against their untouched originals.
What goes in, which engine reads it, what it costs.
A flatbed scan, a photo of a photo, a screenshot re-sent twice — JPEG or PNG in, rebuilt from whatever detail survived.
Scans and Camera Files
Flatbed scans, phone shots, re-sent screenshots
JPEG or PNG In
Output format is yours per pass
Biggest Copy Wins
More surviving pixels, more to rebuild
Written as limits: a repair tool is judged on what it refuses to invent.
Rebuilds edges the lens or the shake took out
Clears block edges and mottling from re-saved files
Quietens sensor noise without wiping texture
Physical damage is content, so it survives the pass
No colourising, no grading; sepia stays sepia
Timed on the default engine, four runs
Six drawers that exist in most families and phones.
Scanning the family box leaves you hundreds of soft, grainy files and no way to reshoot them.
There is one picture of a grandparent, and it is small. It gets enlarged, so invention is worse than nothing.
The original never came back from the phone that took it. What you hold was re-compressed at every hop.
Marketplaces raised their minimum image size; the catalogue did not. The old shot must clear the check again.
Someone hands over a wallet print and wants it wall-sized. Detail has to survive the blow-up.
History groups copy slides faster than anyone checks them, and every pass must leave the record honest.
What you click on the photo enhancer panel, in order.
Find the original scan or the full-size send rather than the thumbnail — the photo enhancer only rebuilds from detail that is still there.
The free-tier photo enhancer engine won our bench and makes a fine first pass. Switch to a paid one for a face or a very large file.
Check the result against your upload at full size. A pass that softened a texture you wanted is worth re-running.
Limits, evidence and cost, before you spend a credit.
No, deliberately. A scratch is content, not lost signal, so it survives alongside the tear and the stain. Softness, grain and blocking lift.
No. Colour is invention, and this photo enhancer adds detail rather than opinions. Black and white comes back black and white.
We degraded two photos four ways, ran the candidates on identical inputs, and scored each output against the untouched original. The default won all four.
Very fine texture. On our compressed-portrait test it rendered teeth as one clean band, and skin came back slightly smoother than life.
Six credits on the default engine, open on the free tier. New accounts open with 10 credits, so a first repair is covered.
Yes — repair starts once you are signed in, and the cost comes off your balance. A file set up first is held as a draft.
Each pass returns the frame at four times its original width and height, as JPEG or PNG — phone-sized becomes wall-sized.
Photo Enhancer for the Photos You Cannot Reshoot
Hand the damaged copy to the photo enhancer, pick an engine, and it rebuilds the edge and texture detail the file lost — faded prints, missed focus and compression blocking alike.
