How to fix a photo in 3 steps
- Load your photo — drop it above or click to browse. Nothing is uploaded; the photo stays on your device.
- Adjust or pick a preset — move the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation sliders, tick Sharpen for a soft photo, or start from a ready preset such as Passport Fix, Vivid, Soft or Black & White.
- Download — the same adjustments are applied again at the photo's full original size, so the saved PNG is print-sharp, not a copy of the small preview.
About fixing photos
Most disappointing phone photos fail in predictable ways: too dark because the subject stood against a window, flat and grey because the light was dull, colours washed out, or slightly soft because the camera moved. Three adjustments repair most of this. Brightness lifts or lowers overall light, contrast separates the darks from the lights so the picture stops looking foggy, and saturation controls colour strength — push it up for vivid travel shots, or take it to zero for a true black & white photo. Sharpening increases edge contrast with a classic 3 × 3 convolution kernel, which makes eyes, text and document edges crisper.
The presets package settings that work together. Passport Fix (brightness 108, contrast 106, saturation 102, sharpen on) gently brightens and crisps an ID photo without changing how the person really looks — the safe direction for official photos, where heavy filters are not allowed. Vivid boosts contrast and colour for landscapes, Soft calms a harsh, high-contrast portrait, and Black & White simply removes all colour. Because the adjustments are applied pixel-by-pixel in your browser with plain arithmetic — not a browser-only CSS filter — the preview and the full-size download always match, in every browser.
How it works
Every pixel passes through the same maths: its red, green and blue values are multiplied by the brightness factor, pushed away from (or pulled towards) mid-grey by the contrast factor, then blended with the pixel's luminance by the saturation factor — saturation 1 keeps the colour, 0 gives pure grey, 2 doubles the colour distance from grey. If Sharpen is on, a 3 × 3 sharpen kernel (centre weight 5, neighbours −1) is applied afterwards. The preview runs this on a downscaled copy for speed; the download runs the identical functions at natural size.
Worked example
A dull pixel of value 100 with Brightness at 150% becomes 100 × 1.5 = 150 — visibly lighter — while a bright pixel of 200 would become 300 and is clamped to the maximum 255. With Saturation at 0%, a pixel of (200, 100, 50) becomes its luminance, about (118, 118, 118): a neutral grey of the same lightness.
Frequently asked questions
Is this photo editor free?
Yes — completely free, with no signup, no watermark and no limit on how many photos you edit.
Will the download match the preview?
Yes. The preview and the download use the exact same per-pixel adjustment and sharpening functions — the download simply runs them on the full-size original instead of a downscaled copy, so it stays sharp for printing.
Can I use Passport Fix for an official ID photo?
Passport Fix is deliberately gentle — a small brightness and contrast lift plus light sharpening — which is the kind of correction that stays within official-photo rules. Heavy colour changes are not applied. Always check your authority's current photo rules before submitting.
What does sharpening actually do?
It applies a 3 × 3 convolution kernel that increases the difference between each pixel and its neighbours. Edges — eyes, hair, text, document borders — become crisper. It cannot recover detail that was never captured, and too much sharpening on an already sharp photo can look harsh, so it is a simple on/off choice here.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. All adjustments happen 100% in your browser, pixel by pixel. Your photo never leaves your device.
Why is the download a PNG?
PNG is lossless, so the exact pixels you previewed are the pixels you save, with no extra JPEG compression on top. If you need a JPG afterwards, run the PNG through our free Image Format Converter.
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