Enlarge an Image Without the Blur
AI 2× and 4× upscaling
Enlarging works out plausible in-between pixels from the ones you already have. It cannot recover a face that was never captured, or read a number plate that is four pixels wide. What a good resampler does is avoid the soft, mushy result you get from naive scaling, and this one uses a Lanczos filter rather than the bilinear scaling a browser does by default.
What is Image Upscaler?
Enlarge an image 2x, 3x or 4x with a proper Lanczos resampler instead of the bilinear scaling a browser does by default, which is what makes naive enlargements look soft. Pick the filter to suit the source, add a little sharpening to restore the crispness that any enlargement costs, and compare against the original before you download. Everything runs in this tab, so there is no upload, no queue, no credit counter and no watermark, and a 4x enlargement of a private photo stays private.
How do I use Image Upscaler?
- Drop an image onto the upload zone.
- Choose a scale, and a filter: Lanczos 3 is sharpest, Mitchell is kinder to noisy photos.
- Adjust sharpening to taste.
- Press Enlarge, compare against the original, then download the PNG.
When should I use Image Upscaler?
Use this when an image has to be physically larger and you want the cleanest interpolation available without an upload. To change the print density rather than the pixel count, use DPI Changer. To make a file smaller, use Image Compressor. To change dimensions without enlarging, use Image Resizer.
Frequently asked questions
Will this recover detail that is not in the photo?
No, and any tool claiming otherwise is either generating plausible fiction or misleading you. Enlarging interpolates between the pixels you already have. It cannot read a number plate that is four pixels wide or sharpen a face that was never in focus. What it can do is enlarge without the soft, mushy look that naive scaling produces.
How is this different from just resizing in a browser or an image editor?
A browser scales bilinearly, which averages a small neighbourhood and loses edge definition. This uses a Lanczos filter, a windowed sinc kernel sampling a wider neighbourhood, which keeps edges and fine texture noticeably better at the same output size. The difference is most visible on text, line art and hard edges.
Which filter should I choose?
Lanczos 3 is the default and the sharpest, and suits most photos, screenshots and line art. Lanczos 2 is slightly softer and shows less ringing next to very hard edges. Mitchell is the softest of the three and is kind to grainy or noisy photographs, where a sharp filter would emphasise the noise.
What does the sharpening slider do?
It applies an unsharp mask: a blurred copy is subtracted from the result to accentuate edges. Every enlargement softens an image a little, and a light pass restores the perceived crispness. Pushed too far it produces halos around high contrast edges, so start low.
Why is there no AI model here?
Because the ones worth having do not fit in a browser honestly. Real-ESRGAN is about 34 MB, past the per-file limit of the platform this site is served from. And a transformer upscaler is worse than useless here: a published assessment of Swin2SR in WebAssembly measured two and a half minutes for a single 2x pass, around 490 MiB of memory, and output that lost to plain Lanczos on image quality metrics across every test image. Shipping a fast, honest resampler beats shipping a slow one that is also worse.
Why is the result a PNG?
Because re-encoding an enlargement as JPEG would add compression artefacts on top of interpolated pixels, which is the worst of both. PNG keeps the result exactly as computed. Run it through Image Compressor afterwards if you need a smaller file.
Is there a size limit?
There is no upload limit because there is no upload. The practical ceiling is about 16 megapixels of output, past which a browser tab stops being responsive; the tool tells you before you hit it rather than freezing.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser. Your files never leave your device, and there is no server component for this tool.
Tools that pair well with Image Upscaler
- Image Resizer resize to exact pixels or %, free and in your browser.
- DPI Converter change print dpi losslessly, free and in your browser.
- Image Compressor shrink file size, keep quality, free and in your browser.
- Background Remover automatic bg removal, free and in your browser.