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A photographed document or a scan usually comes out flat and grey, because the camera exposed for the whole scene and the scanner for the whole page. This tool stretches the tonal range back out so the darkest parts reach black and the lightest reach white, and restores the edge contrast that resizing and compression soften. Both are recoveries of something the capture lost, not additions - no detail is generated, no model runs, and the same image produces the same result every time. If your image already uses the full range, the tool says so and leaves it alone rather than doing something for the sake of it.
This tool accepts JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and AVIF files. Everything is decoded by your own browser, so the formats available depend on what your browser can open - which for HEIC in particular varies between Safari and other browsers.
Because the image is rebuilt from raw pixels, EXIF metadata such as camera details, timestamps and GPS coordinates does not carry into the result. Orientation is applied to the pixels first, so photographs stay the right way up. Embedded colour profiles are also dropped and the output is saved as sRGB, which can shift colours slightly in wide-gamut photographs. Animated files are refused rather than being flattened to a single frame.
No, and the distinction matters here more than it usually does. This is arithmetic on the pixels you supplied: a histogram is measured, a scale factor is applied, and neighbouring pixels are compared to find edges. Nothing is generated, nothing is predicted, and no model is downloaded or run. The practical difference is that everything in the output was in your image already - which is exactly what you want from a photograph of a document you may have to rely on.
It finds the darkest and lightest tones actually present, ignoring a fraction of a percent at each end so one dead pixel or one specular highlight cannot spoil the measurement, and stretches everything between them to fill the full range. The same scale is applied to red, green and blue, so a neutral grey stays neutral and no colour can appear that was not there. That last point is a deliberate limitation: stretching each channel to its own range would also remove colour casts, but it cannot tell a cast from a subject that is genuinely one colour, and it turns a sunset grey.
No. Sharpening increases the contrast at edges that are already there, which makes an image look crisper and can undo the softening that a resize or a heavy JPEG pass introduced. It cannot recover detail the lens or the sensor never captured - a photograph taken out of focus stays out of focus, with slightly more contrast at the blurry edges. Anything claiming otherwise is generating detail and guessing at what it should be.
Because there was nothing to correct, and the tool prefers saying so to doing something anyway. An image that already spans the full tonal range gets no stretch, and a flat area with no edges gets no sharpening - trying anyway would amplify the paper grain in a blank scan into visible blotches. The result panel tells you which corrections actually ran rather than claiming both every time.
Yes. A batch of photographs from one camera under one set of lights usually needs the same correction, which is exactly the case where doing them individually is tedious. Each image is measured on its own, so a folder of mixed exposures gets the right stretch for each one rather than an average that suits none of them.
No. The corrections run on your device, in your browser, and a content security policy the browser enforces stops this page sending anything to another domain. There is no model to fetch and no service to call, so unlike most of what this site does, this tool would work with the network switched off after the page had loaded.
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