Upscale manga panels online

A printed manga page has very fine detail: thin pen lines, small lettering and screentones, the dot or line patterns used for shading. A scan needs a high resolution to capture that. Many scans and digital copies are much smaller, and the problems are easy to spot:

• Lines look jagged or grey and blurry instead of solid black.
• Lettering in speech bubbles is small and soft, especially furigana and sound effects.
• Screentones turn into moire, a wavy interference pattern, or into flat grey.
• JPEG compression leaves halos around lines and blotches in white areas.
• Slightly yellow or uneven paper shows as a grey or tinted background.

Start with the cleanest copy. If you see JPEG halos or blotches, Enhance removes them at the same size. It was built for photographs, so check white paper and flat black at 100 % for faint texture.

To enlarge the page, Upscale 4× makes it four times wider and taller and accepts images up to 5 MP. It was built and tested on photographs and adds fine texture, which can show as grain on white paper or in flat black. Check a page at 100 % before you run a whole chapter through it.

If the scan resolved the individual dots, enlarging keeps a regular pattern. If the scan was too small to resolve them, the dots have already turned into moire or grey, and the original pattern cannot be recovered. PhotoRescue does not draw a new screentone pattern over the area. Expect smooth grey shading there rather than crisp dots.

Start from the largest, least compressed copy of the page. If you are scanning yourself, scan at a high resolution and save as PNG; that beats any enlargement of a small scan. If you only have a small copy, check it at 100 % for halos around lines.

If you see halos or blotches, run Enhance first, then enlarge the cleaned page. Split double-page spreads that are larger than the upload limit into single pages first. Free uploads are limited to 3 MB and 8 MP and paid uploads to 20 MB and 30 MP.

Check the result for broken lines, lettering that changed shape, and shaded areas. If you read on a tablet, reduce the result to the screen's resolution; extra pixels beyond that make files bigger without making the page look sharper.

When lettering is legible in the scan, a cleaner and larger page is easier to read. When it is too small or blurred to read, it stays unreadable; the tools do not guess characters. This applies especially to furigana and tiny margin notes, which are often only a few pixels tall in small scans. If you translate or study the text, rely on what you can read in the source. Our page on blurry text in images explains why.

PhotoRescue does not clean scan defects beyond compression and softness. It does not straighten pages, remove bleed-through from the other side, whiten yellowed paper, remove text or redraw missing art. If you already run a dedicated manga model on your own computer with good scans, it may serve you better for bulk work. PhotoRescue is most useful when you want a browser tool with no setup.

Please upscale only pages you have the right to use, such as your own work or public domain material. Free use is 3 credits a day with a watermark, enough to test a page or two. Paid plans remove the watermark and process batches of up to 50 images: Pro includes 200 credits a month for $9.99, Pro+ 500 for $19.99. Uploads and results are deleted within 24 hours.