One-tap photo enhancer

1. White balance: it finds the brightest near-neutral areas, such as a white wall, paper or a cloud, and removes the tint they carry. A photo with nothing neutral in it, like a sunset, is left alone.
2. Levels: the darkest and brightest few pixels set new black and white points, so a washed-out photo regains depth without clipping.
3. Midtones: when the detailed parts of the picture are dark, they are lifted a little. Big flat areas such as a black backdrop don’t count.
4. Grain: noise is measured on a full-size crop, then smoothed with an edge-preserving (bilateral) filter matched to that amount.
5. Sharpening: an unsharp mask on brightness only, so colours don’t fringe, which ignores differences smaller than the grain left over.

Under the result, a short list names what was changed, for example “Warmed a cool colour cast” or “Stretched the contrast”, so you know what you’re looking at. A well-exposed photo may only get the sharpening.

The biggest gains come from photos taken in poor conditions: rooms lit by warm bulbs or blue daylight, grey overcast days, phone shots in dim light, and scans of prints that have faded. A photo that was already good changes only a little, which is the point.

• Camera shake and missed focus stay. Sharpening makes edges crisper; it can’t put back detail that was never recorded.
• Heavy night-time noise softens but doesn’t vanish, and Strong noise reduction can make skin look waxy.
• Mixed light, such as a lamp and a window in one room, gives two colour casts; only one can be balanced.
• Blown-out highlights and black shadows have no detail left to bring back.

Tip: Enhance first, then add a filter if you want a look. Starting from corrected colour and light makes any filter behave more predictably.

Upscale 2× doubles the width and height with a smooth cubic resize, then sharpens at the new size. It’s useful for print or for cropping in later, but it adds no new detail. For Instagram it isn’t needed: Instagram keeps photos up to 1,080 pixels wide and sizes wider ones down to 1,080.

For a small or heavily compressed image that has to get bigger, use the image upscaler’s Photo mode instead. Its AI model rebuilds edges and clears JPEG blocks, which a resize can’t do.

Everything happens in this tab: nothing is uploaded, nothing is downloaded, and the saved file carries no camera details or location. With WebGPU, a 12-megapixel phone photo takes about a second on a recent laptop. Without it, the same maths runs on the processor in a few seconds; both give the same picture.

Photos up to 40 MB open, and anything over 16 megapixels is reduced to 16 first. With Upscale 2× on, results stop at 4096 pixels on the long side.