Sharpen Image
NewSharpen a soft photo in your browser and see the difference at real pixels. Edges get crisper without colored halos or grainy skin. It works on photos that are slightly soft; nothing can rebuild detail a bad blur destroyed.
Drop a soft photo here
or paste with Ctrl+V. JPG, PNG, WebP and iPhone HEIC all work.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your images are never uploaded to a server.
How it works
- Drop in a photo that looks slightly soft.
- It is sharpened with the Standard setting and shown at 100%, the only view where sharpening is visible.
- Drag across the picture to compare, and click the small map to look at a face or some text.
- Try the presets, or set Amount, Radius and Threshold yourself.
- Download at full resolution in the same format.
Common use cases
- Crisping up a phone photo that came out slightly soft.
- Sharpening a photo after enlarging it, which always softens it a little.
- Making product photos look crisper for a shop listing.
- Adding punch to a landscape with the Clarity setting.
- Sharpening a scanned photo or document for print.
Frequently asked questions
- Can this unblur a photo?
- It can make a slightly soft photo look sharp, which is often what unblur means in practice. It cannot bring back detail that was never captured: a badly out-of-focus or motion-blurred photo has lost that information, and sharpening it only makes the blur's edges harsher. Tools that claim to fully unblur are inventing detail with AI, which can look convincing but is not what was in the photo.
- How does sharpening work?
- It finds edges by comparing the photo with a blurred copy of itself, then boosts the difference, so the dark side of every edge gets slightly darker and the light side slightly lighter. That extra contrast at edges is what the eye reads as sharpness. The method is called an unsharp mask, after the darkroom technique it copies.
- Why can I barely see a difference?
- Probably because you are looking at the whole picture shrunk to fit your screen, which averages away the very edge contrast sharpening adds. Switch to the 100% view, which shows real pixels, and the difference is obvious.
- What do Amount, Radius and Threshold do?
- Amount is how strong the effect is. Radius is how wide the edges it works on are: around 1 pixel for fine detail like hair and text, larger for overall punch. Threshold leaves small differences alone, so skin, skies and camera noise stay smooth while real edges are sharpened.
- Why do some sharpened photos get colored halos?
- Because they sharpen red, green and blue separately, and where the three channels disagree along an edge, a colored fringe appears. This sharpens brightness only and applies the same change to all three, so colors stay where they were.
- Is my photo uploaded?
- No. Sharpening happens in your browser, so the photo never leaves your device.