Top 5 Free Apps to Increase Picture Resolution

Nowadays, you can easily capture high-quality pictures with your phone or digital camera. However, due to improper settings, unsteady hands, dark environments, autofocus issues, or other reasons, there are still situations that can result in low-resolution photos. Moreover, you may get blurry and compressed images from social media platforms. So, you need a free app to increase picture resolution.

Part 1. How Can I Improve the Quality of a Photo Once It's Taken

Before introducing the apps, I would like to talk about several ways you can improve the quality of a photo after it's been taken. You should also know the limitations of increasing picture resolution.

When you want to improve the quality of a captured photo, you can try upscaling the image resolution. Some free apps offer basic upscaling features to increase the resolution of an image and make it clearer. Some AI-powered apps can even create and add details while upscaling. That improves the photo clarity.

To enhance photo quality, you can also choose to sharpen the blurry parts. Some sharpening tools can help reduce blur and background noise to sharpen details and improve overall quality. For old and low light captured pictures, you can adjust brightness, contrast, color, and more settings to improve clarity and show more details.

If your picture is captured with unnecessary background elements or unwanted areas, you can crop it to easily improve its quality. That helps to draw attention to the main subject and enhance the perceived resolution.

Many free apps offer image upscaling functions to help increase the resolution of your picture. However, the upscaling process doesn’t create new details and may cause artifacts. When you enlarge a blurred photo, you may easily get a larger but still blurry image. You’d better use a free AI image enhancer to analyze the existing image data and intelligently add more details.

Part 2. Check the 5 Best Free Apps to Increase Picture Resolution

With so many associated image editing, and enhancement apps offered on the market, you don’t need to manually edit your pictures and improve quality step by step. This part shares five free apps to handle old, grainy, and low-resolution photos, effectively increasing picture resolution and making them clear.

Picwand AI Image Upscaler

Picwand AI Image Upscaler is a free AI-powered image enhancement app that can help you increase picture resolution and improve overall quality. It provides both a web version and mobile apps for increasing photo quality on computers and phones. Picwand can edit pictures in all commonly used image formats, including JPEG, JPG, PNG, TIFF, HEIF, and BMP.

Picwand AI Image Upscaler lets you easily increase picture resolution to 2×, 4×, 6×, or 8×. It uses the latest AI technology to upscale image resolution while keeping quality. Once your picture is added, this free app will analyze it and automatically add new details, sharpen blurry edges, adjust brightness, and more to enhance it.

To make a picture clear directly on your iPhone or Android phone, you can search for and get the free Picwand app in the App Store or Google Play Store. Like the web version, it enables you to increase picture resolution and improve quality for free.

The Picwand app offers three main features: AI Photo Editor, Background Remover, and Watermark Removal. You can use AI Photo Editor to upscale your photo to 2K, 4K, 6K, or even 8K resolution based on your specific need. You need to permit this free app to access pictures on your portable device and then make the enhancement. You can compare the resolution-increased picture with the source image. When you are satisfied with the result, you can select a desired way to download or share it.

Picsart AI Photo Video Editor

Picsart is an all-featured photo and video editing app that also offers various enhancement functions. It provides a convenient solution for Android and iOS users to increase picture resolution easily. It offers a full suite of AI-powered editing features. It enables you to clean up pictures, remove unwanted backgrounds, apply effects, add text and stickers, and more.

This free app has a dedicated Resize tool that allows you to adjust the image dimensions and resolution. Moreover, Picsart is designed with a Sharpen tool to increase picture resolution by enhancing edge details and reducing blur. It offers a simple way to enhance low-quality photos and make them clearer.

Remini AI Photo Enhancer

Remini AI Photo Enhancer is a popular image enhancement app that can help you easily improve the overall quality of your pictures. You can access it from the web on your desktop or app store of your mobile devices. It adopts AI technology to enhance old, blurry, or damaged pictures. These advanced AI algorithms ensure a straightforward way to improve photo resolution, sharpen details, and remove noise.

The Remini AI Photo Enhancer mobile app offers various AI-powered tools. It allows you to easily generate AI photos and apply AI filters. To increase picture resolution, you can simply tap Enhance on the bottom, add your picture, and let Remini do the rest. It will take a few seconds to get the upscaled image. You can drag the middle line to check and compare the details. Remini can produce truly great results, especially for restoring old photos or improving low-resolution pictures.

Pixlr Photo Editor

Pixlr Photo Editor is an easy-to-use image editing app that offers basic upscaling capabilities. It is designed with a concise interface for you to easily access its features, such as sharpen, crop, rotate, adjustment, auto contrast, autofix, and more. To enhance edge details and clarity, you can rely on its sharpen tool. Pixlr also lets you increase picture resolution by adjusting the width and height values. While using the free app, you will see some ads or prompts for upgrading.

Compared with other image enhancement apps, Pixlr offers a more friendly user experience. It carries some basic AI tools like Auto Fix and Auto Contrast. You can handily adjust brightness, color, contrast, and more to make a picture clear. Moreover, it allows you to directly enter width and height to change the resolution of an image.

Snapseed

Snapseed is a famous photo editor app developed by Google. You can use this free app to increase picture resolution on both Android and iOS devices. It provides commonly used editing functions, including crop, rotate, expand, HDR scape, white balance, and more.

You can go to its Tune Image to customize brightness, contrast, saturation, highlights, shadows, and other settings. To sharpen a photo and adjust the structure, you can choose Details. Also, you can select and apply a suitable filter from Looks. It is equipped with various options to freely edit your picture and optimize its quality. Snapseed is a totally free app for image editing. You won’t see any ads while using the app.

Part 3. Helpful Tips to Avoid Damaging Photo Quality

To avoid damaging photo quality, I would like to share some helpful tips that you should know.

Before shooting photos, you need to check the camera's settings and adjust them appropriately. If you use an iPhone or Android phone to take pictures, you can simply select the highest resolution and quality.

For these valuable pictures, you’d better make a copy on your computer, cloud storage, or an external hard drive. Avoid repeatedly saving photos or transferring them. When you edit photos, you should select a reputable and stable editor. Also, you should use editing tools like sharpening and noise reduction carefully. Whether you want to transfer, edit, or share your pictures, you should use their backups.

Part 4. FAQs of Free App to Increase Picture Resolution

Is there a free app to improve picture quality?

Yes, there are many associated image editing, upscaling, and enhancement apps that can help you increase photo quality for free. Some popular ones include Picwand AI Image Upscaler, Canva, Adobe Express, Enhance Photo Quality, and Remini AI Photo Enhancer. They use AI or other advanced technologies to upscale the image resolution, add details, and adjust brightness, contrast, and more to improve the overall quality of your photos. However, these free apps may have limitations, such as feature and file size limits, slow processing time, ads, or watermarks.

How do I make a picture higher resolution on my phone?

Generally, you get two main ways to make a picture appear higher resolution on your phone: adjusting camera settings for shooting at the highest quality and upscaling captured pictures.
You can open the Camera app on your iPhone or Android phone, go to Settings, and then tap the Image Quality, Picture Size, or another similar option. Choose the highest resolution option to take photos. To make an existing picture higher resolution, you can use an introduced image upscaler app like Picwand.

Is Remini free to use?

Remini AI Photo Enhancer offers both web-based and mobile apps. Technically, you can use Remini for free, whether on your computer, iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. However, the free version comes with limitations. You can only enhance several image files with a watermark. Moreover, it has features, format, processing speed, and other limits. You must upgrade to a paid subscription to break partial or all limitations.

Summary

This article recommends 5 free apps for you to increase picture resolution and enhance quality. You can start with an AI-powered image upscaler like Picwand. These apps use advanced AI technology to give a better upscaling and enhancement experience.