Sharpen an image
Crisp up a soft photo without halos or colour fringes.
How this works
- It measures your photo first — the histogram, the colour cast, how much is crushed to black or blown to white, how much noise there is and how crisp the edges are. The starting settings come from those readings, not from a preset everything gets.
- Nothing is uploaded — the whole thing runs in your browser, including the full-resolution version you download. Your photo never leaves the device.
- It can’t invent detail — a badly out-of-focus or heavily compressed photo has lost information, and no amount of sharpening brings it back. This fixes exposure, colour and contrast, which is what most photos actually need.
This page changes nothing except detail. Exposure, colour and contrast are left exactly as they are, which is what you want when the photo is otherwise fine and simply looks soft.
Two controls do the work. Sharpen is a narrow-radius unsharp mask: it raises the contrast right at the edges. Clarity is the same operation at a much wider radius, which adds the impression of depth and texture without touching fine detail.
Two details make the difference between sharper and crunchy. The sharpening is applied to brightness only, never to the colour channels, so edges do not pick up coloured fringes. And it ignores differences below a threshold, so flat areas — sky, skin, paper — are left alone instead of having their noise amplified.
How to use it
- Drop in the photo that looks soft.
- A starting amount is set from how crisp its edges already are.
- Compare with the slider — sharpening is easy to overdo and hard to see until you do.
- Adjust Sharpen and Clarity, then download.
Frequently asked questions
Can this fix an out-of-focus photo?
No. Sharpening exaggerates edges that exist; it cannot recreate detail that was never recorded. On a genuinely blurred photo the result is a blurry photo with hard, ugly outlines. If the softness came from camera shake or missed focus, the file cannot be rescued.
What is the difference between Sharpen and Clarity?
The radius. Sharpen works over a pixel or two and affects fine edges. Clarity works over a couple of percent of the image and affects broad tonal transitions — it makes a photo look punchier and more three-dimensional without making the pixels look processed.
I can see pale outlines around dark objects.
That is a halo, and it means the amount is too high. Reduce Sharpen. Halos are the usual giveaway of an over-sharpened photo, and they get worse, not better, if you sharpen again later.
Should I sharpen before or after resizing?
After. Sharpening then shrinking throws away the work; shrinking then sharpening gives a clean result at the size you will actually use.
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