Fix blocky, compressed screenshots

Screenshots are made of hard edges: thin letters, one-pixel lines, flat coloured boxes. JPEG compression was designed for photos and handles hard edges badly. It leaves ringing, which looks like faint halos and speckles around every letter and icon, and square blocks in flat areas. Resizing does the rest, blending neighbouring pixels so letter edges turn grey and soft.

Common routes to a damaged screenshot are sending it through a chat app that recompresses it as a photo, uploading it to a site that resizes images, and saving it as a JPEG instead of a PNG. A screenshot can also be soft from the start if the content on screen was already scaled, such as a zoomed-out PDF or a paused video.

Most damage can be avoided at capture time:

• Use the system screenshot shortcut instead of photographing the screen.
• Zoom the content in before you capture it, so text is drawn with more pixels.
• Save as PNG where you have the choice; PNG keeps text edges exact.
• In chat apps that compress images, send the screenshot as a file or document.
• Crop in an editor instead of zooming in and taking a second screenshot.

For halos, speckles and blocks around text and icons, use Enhance. It removes JPEG compression damage at the same size, and text it detects is protected rather than redrawn. It was built for photographs, so flat areas can pick up faint texture and very small or dense text can occasionally be missed. Compare the result with the original.

For a screenshot that is clean but too small, Upscale 4× makes it four times wider and taller. Small text stays as soft as it was, because the model does not guess letters. If it is both blocky and small, clean it first and enlarge the cleaned file; enlarging first would enlarge the halos too.

When the text matters, a fresh screenshot saved as PNG is always better than any repair of a compressed copy.

Cleaning compression makes a screenshot nicer to look at, and text that was readable is easier on the eye afterwards. It does not make unreadable text readable. If a word has been reduced to a grey smear a few pixels tall, the information that tells one letter from another is gone. Any tool that shows crisp letters in that spot is guessing.

A wrong digit in a price, a reference number or a date is worse than an honest blur. If you need the exact text and the screenshot is unreadable, ask for the original document or a new screenshot. Our page on blurry text in images shows how to tell which case you have.

A photo of a monitor taken with a phone is not a screenshot. It has perspective distortion, glare, focus errors and often moire, the wavy colour pattern caused by the screen's pixel grid. PhotoRescue does not reliably remove moire or correct perspective. A real screenshot is always the better source.

Screenshots often contain names, messages, account numbers or addresses. Uploads and results are deleted within 24 hours and never used to train AI, but the safest habit is to crop or cover what you do not need before uploading. Areas someone deliberately blurred or pixelated cannot be revealed; PhotoRescue is not built for that.

You get 3 free credits a day with no sign-up or card; free results carry a watermark. Paid plans remove the watermark and process batches of up to 50 images. Pro is $9.99 a month for 200 credits and Pro+ $19.99 for 500.