Fix Pixelated Images Online: Free AI Depixelator

Why the file looks like a mosaic

Open the picture at 100 percent and look at a diagonal. If the steps are hard and square, something resized the file by repeating pixels. Phones do this when a crop from a group photo is exported as a tiny JPEG and then dropped into a slide. Screenshots do it because the screen was already a grid of device pixels, and a later app enlarged that grid.

JPEG adds a second pattern. The blocks are 8 by 8, and the color inside them smears. A face that is both pixelated and heavily compressed will not become the original. A useful repair draws a plausible edge along the cheek and leaves the earring where the small file put it. If the earring moves, the model invented a person.

Text, logos, and spreadsheet screenshots are the hostile case. A model trained on photographs tries to turn a letter into foliage or skin. For a UI capture, export the original screen or retype the words. For a lamp, a window, a pet, or a scanned print, the guess is often good enough to judge on the slider.

What to do before you spend a credit

Crop to the subject. A 400-pixel face inside a 4000-pixel screenshot will not get the model's attention. The stair-steps you care about should fill the frame. Then run 2×, which is the free and guest mode. If the subject holds, 4× is the print jump and lives on the Pro plan. 8× is for an original that was tiny, and it lives on Studio.

Do not sharpen first. Sharpening outlines the blocks and gives the upscaler a harder edge to copy. Denoise only if there is speckle on top of the blocks. Most pixelated files want the upscale, not the denoise.

The tool shows the original and the repair on one slider. The preview is full quality and has no watermark. Guest and Free plan downloads are capped at 3,200 pixels on the long edge, so you can judge the repair without taking the print file. Free pages show ads. Pro and Studio are ad-free.

A mosaic is not the same as a small photo

People say pixelated when they mean three different files. The first was resized with nearest neighbor, so every edge is a stair. The second is a JPEG whose 8 by 8 blocks have started to show because the quality slider was already low. The third is a photograph that was always small, with soft edges and no stairs at all. The tool can help the first two. The third is a low-resolution photo, and the page for that defect is the better map, because a 2× pass on a soft small file looks different from a 2× pass on hard stairs.

Count the squares before you spend the credit. If a cheek is twelve blocks tall, the model has almost no contour to follow and will invent a face-shaped average. That average can be pleasant and still be the wrong person. Crop tighter only when the remaining squares still describe an eye, a collar, a window mullion. If the crop is a pure checkerboard, stop. Retype the slide, re-export the screenshot, or reshoot. Super-resolution does not store a secret copy of the pixels a resize deleted.

After the slider looks honest, decide the delivery size. Guest and Free plan downloads stop at 3,200 px on the long edge, which is enough to see whether the stairs are gone and and it covers a 300 ppi 8×10, whose long edge is 3,000. Pro and Studio keep the full result. None of those downloads are watermarked, and none of the pages carry ads. The upload and the result are deleted after 24 hours, so the file you mean to keep has to land on your disk the same day.

A last look at the stairs

Before you download, zoom the slider until one stair fills the view. If the repair replaced the step with a smooth diagonal that could have been in the room, keep it. If it replaced the step with a texture from a different object, a brick pattern on a cheek or a letter that grew a serif, discard it. Pixelation is the defect this page is for, and the success condition is boring: the grid is gone and nothing new arrived.