Restore JPG Photo Quality — Fix JPEG Compression and Damage
Restore JPG and JPEG photos that have been degraded by compression, repeated saving, social media re-encoding, or age. Our AI specifically targets JPEG artifacts — banding, blockiness, ringing — and reconstructs the clean detail underneath.
Free local tracing needs no account. AI tools use credits and upload files for processing.
Explore features and examplesFrom your image to editable paths
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Open your file
PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, or BMP up to 10 MB in the free workspace (the AI converter takes PNG, JPG, WebP, or AVIF). Existing SVGs can be edited in the free workspace.
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Trace and inspect
Preview the shapes and colors. Clear logos and flat artwork usually trace more predictably than photos.
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Make it yours
Edit the SVG, compare optional optimization, and download your result.
Working with your SVG
May reduce visible scratches and stains
May reduce visible scratches and stains
In Your Browser
Upload a PNG, JPEG, or WebP file and download the result when processing finishes. Nothing to install.
Source-dependent color adjustment
Source-dependent color adjustment
No Watermark
Download the result without a watermark, then check it before you use it. Results depend on the source image.
JPG, PNG, and WebP input
JPG, PNG, and WebP input
Multi-Tool Platform
After processing, use our other AI tools — upscaling, restoration, vectorization — all in one platform with shared credits.
AI conversion features
- Process JPG/JPEG files directly
- May reduce visible scratches and stains
- Source-dependent color adjustment
- May enhance visible facial detail
- Noise and grain reduction
- JPG, PNG, and WebP input
- No software installation required
- Works in any modern browser
- Commercial use allowed
- Pay-per-use — no subscription
- 1 free credit after you verify your email
Questions about your file
Free local tools. Optional AI credits.
Local tracing and SVG editing need no credits. AI conversion includes one credit after email verification; additional packs start at $9.99.
The Five Types of JPEG Damage and How AI Fixes Each One
JPEG compression creates five distinct artifact types, each damaging your photos in a different way. Blocking artifacts appear as a visible 8x8 pixel grid, most obvious in smooth areas like sky or walls. Ringing artifacts (also called Gibbs phenomenon) create ghost echoes around sharp edges — look at dark text on a light background and you will see faint halos. Color bleeding occurs when the chroma subsampling (4:2:0) spreads color information across neighboring pixels, causing red from a shirt to leak into adjacent gray areas.
Mosquito noise shows up as flickering, buzzing artifacts around high-contrast edges — the name comes from the way these small distortions seem to "buzz" around object boundaries. Finally, banding (posterization) transforms smooth gradients into visible stair-stepped color bands, turning a beautiful sunset into a series of discrete color strips. Each of these artifacts has a different mathematical cause and requires a different correction strategy.
What makes AI restoration uniquely powerful for JPEG damage is generation loss — the accumulation of artifacts from repeatedly opening, editing, and re-saving a JPEG file. Each save cycle requantizes the DCT coefficients, compounding errors. A photo saved 5 times at quality 80 looks significantly worse than one saved once at quality 80. Social media makes this worse: you upload a photo to Instagram (re-compressed), someone screenshots it (re-encoded), shares to WhatsApp (re-compressed again), and by the time it reaches you, the image has been through 3-4 rounds of lossy encoding. Our AI can reverse much of this accumulated damage.
Pro Tips for Better Results
Identify your specific artifact types before restoring
Zoom to 200-400% and look at smooth areas (sky, walls, skin) for blocking and banding. Check around sharp edges (text, object boundaries) for ringing and mosquito noise. Look at color transitions for color bleeding. Knowing what is wrong helps you evaluate whether the restoration was successful.
Save the restored output as PNG to stop the damage cycle
After restoration, saving back to JPEG starts a new round of compression damage. Save as PNG (lossless) to permanently preserve the restored quality. You can always convert to JPEG later for web use, but keep the PNG as your master copy. This single step prevents future generation loss.
Process the oldest available version of the photo
If you have multiple copies of the same photo (in email, cloud storage, camera roll, social media), find the oldest or highest-quality version. Each copy may have gone through different compression pipelines. The version with the least generation loss will produce the best restoration results.
Compare skin tones before and after restoration
Skin is one of the hardest areas for JPEG — compression creates both banding across skin gradients and color bleeding from nearby objects. After restoration, zoom into faces and compare skin tone smoothness and color accuracy against a known reference. The AI should have smoothed banding while preserving natural skin texture variation.
Understanding JPEG Generation Loss and Why It Compounds
JPEG compression transforms image data using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), then quantizes the frequency coefficients to reduce file size. This quantization is lossy — it permanently discards data. When you open a JPEG, it is decoded back to pixels, but the original pre-quantization values are gone. Re-saving performs a new DCT and quantization on already-degraded data, compounding errors. After N saves at quality Q, artifacts grow approximately as sqrt(N) times the single-save error. At quality 80, a single save produces mild artifacts. After 5 saves, artifacts are roughly 2.2x worse. After 10 saves, 3.2x worse. This is why photos shared through messaging apps degrade so quickly — each forwarding event is another save cycle. Our AI restoration model is trained on images with varying degrees of generation loss, from single-save to heavy multi-generation degradation, and adapts its correction intensity accordingly.