Upscale a Photo Without Losing Quality
AI boosts resolution 2-4x and restores sharpness. Processing runs locally on our own hardware, your photos never go to the cloud.
Upscale a photo without losing quality
AI upscaling runs locally on our own hardware. It restores sharpness to blurry shots and raises the resolution of small sources. Output is a JPG.
A harder case? Manual retouching
AI handles most photos, but on heavily damaged shots a human hand delivers a result no model can match. The gdefoto team restores photos from €2 per shot.
Order manual retouchingWhen upscaling helps
- A small product shot at 600×800, but the marketplace wants at least 1500×2000
- An old photo from a point-and-shoot or an early iPhone
- A screenshot of a document or screen you need to print
- A low-resolution archive photo
- A crop from a wide shot that lost its detail
Modes and scales
Universal
A heavy model, works best on product, portrait and landscape shots. Processing takes 3-15 seconds depending on size. Use it by default.
Fast
A lightweight model, 5-7x faster. Great for screenshots, diagrams and simple images. On complex textures (fur, fabrics) it falls short of Universal.
x2 vs x4
x2 doubles the resolution and is usually enough. x4 is for very small sources or large-format printing. On 4000+ pixels x4 will not run (output limit is 8000 pixels).
How to use it
- Drag a photo into the upload area
- Choose a scale (x2 by default) and a mode
- Click Upscale
- In 2-15 seconds get the result as a JPG
FAQ
Does AI invent detail that was not there?
In a sense, yes. The model is trained on low-to-high resolution pairs and predicts what the detail should look like. These are not real pixels but a plausible reconstruction. For catalog print and web it is enough. For forensics it is not suitable.
Can I upscale a face or text?
For faces, photo restoration works better, where the AI is tuned for facial detail. For text, results vary: crisp printed text is fine, handwriting or tiny fonts may smear.
What are the size limits?
Input: up to 25 MB, up to 2000 pixels on the long side. If your photo is larger, it is automatically downscaled before processing. Output: up to 8000×8000.
Is there a daily photo limit?
10 photos per minute and 60 photos per day per IP. If you need more, message us in chat.
What is the output format?
JPG at 92% quality. If you need PNG or TIFF, re-save it in the format you need after downloading.
Related tools
- Restore photo, for blurry shots with faces
- Remove background, AI cutout
- HEIC to JPG, iPhone photo converter
If AI could not handle your case (very heavy blur, a destroyed source), leave a request and we will restore it by hand with a pro retoucher.
What can realistically be saved and what cannot
Upscaling is not a universal cure, and it is fairer to draw the limits up front. Shots that are technically sound but simply small come out well: a sharp 700×900 frame, a clean crop, an old product image from an archive. Here the model works with real image structure and extends it convincingly.
Three kinds of damage resist it. First, motion blur from a shaking camera or a moving subject. Directional blur erases edge information, so enlargement only makes the mush bigger. Second, heavy noise from low-light phone shots. The model often mistakes grain for texture and turns it into a plastic ripple. Third, a small JPEG that has been recompressed several times, for example a 300×300 image pulled out of a chat app. Blocking artifacts and halos along the contours are already baked into the pixels, and upscaling amplifies them along with the detail.
There is a middle case: a photo that is in focus but slightly soft because of cheap optics or lazy autofocus. Results there are usually decent, though small print on packaging and seams in fabric may smear. The practical rule is simple. If you can see a detail in the original at 100% zoom, upscaling will enlarge and clean it. If the detail is not there, nothing can bring it back, and enlarging only makes the loss more visible.
What actually happens to a photo when you enlarge it
Classic enlargement in an editor is interpolation: the software computes intermediate pixels by averaging their neighbours. Hence the familiar mushy look, the image gets bigger but no sharper, because no new information appeared.
Neural upscaling works differently. The model is trained on pairs of frames where the same subject is known in both low and high resolution. Given a small shot, it predicts a plausible structure: where an edge should be, where fabric texture belongs, where a smooth gradient runs. That is reconstruction, not recovery of the original data, which is worth remembering if the image serves as evidence or as a basis for precise measurement.
One side effect matters a lot: the model enlarges signal and garbage with equal honesty. Noise becomes coarser and more visible, JPEG blocking turns into square patches across flat areas, and halos left by earlier oversharpening spread into wide bright rims. That is why a clean but small source beats a large file that has been resaved many times. If unnatural blotches appear on skin, sky or matte plastic after upscaling, the culprit is usually not the scale factor but the compression quality of the source file.
What resolution each job actually needs
The target size is set by the destination, not by a wish to make things bigger. Product listings: Amazon enables zoom from 1600 pixels on the long side and rejects anything under 1000 pixels, eBay recommends the same 1600, and a comfortable working figure is 1500×2000 or above, otherwise the zoom view looks soft. Etsy and Shopify galleries behave the same way, and Shopify themes typically serve images up to 2048 pixels wide.
Web and social: a blog header or a desktop banner wants 1600-2000 pixels across, and given high-density screens a margin does no harm. Thumbnails and icons usually need no enlargement at all.
Print is measured differently, through density. Quality printing assumes 300 dpi, so a 10×15 cm photo needs about 1200×1800 pixels and an A4 sheet about 2480×3508. For a poster or a banner viewed from two or three metres, 100-150 dpi is enough and the requirement drops by half or more.
A sensible tactic is to keep a 20-30% margin above the stated minimum. That leaves room for a crop, a slight rotation to level the horizon and the final compression. Chasing x4 where x2 is enough gains nothing: the file is heavier, processing is slower and artifacts show more.
How to get the best possible result
The best upscale is the one you did not need. If the shoot is still ahead, capture with resolution to spare and keep the originals: disk space is cheaper than reshooting. Frame in camera rather than later, because every aggressive crop is thrown-away pixels.
With existing files a few plain rules apply. Use the earliest version of the file you have, the one straight from the camera, not the one that travelled through a chat app and a couple of reposts. Do not pre-enlarge the picture in an editor before uploading, since the model handles a genuine source better than an already interpolated one.
Order of operations matters. Upscale first, then colour correction and sharpening, and only at the very end compress for the destination. Do it the other way round and sharpening first will leave halos that the upscaler inflates into visible rims. Compressing last is deliberate too: every JPEG resave adds artifacts, so it should happen once, as the final step.
Do not try to win everything in one pass. An x2 upscale followed by careful manual sharpening almost always looks more natural than x4 head-on. And judge the result at 100% zoom rather than on a shrunken preview, where artifacts of any kind stay invisible.