Image Preparer Clean up Options

Clean-up Options

There are three sliders, each from 0 (off) to 100 (strongest). Drag a slider, or click the number next to it, type a value and press Enter (Esc throws away what you typed). Hover over a slider's name for a short reminder of what it does.

The app always applies them in this order: JPEG artifact removal first, then color noise removal, then detail recovery.

Color noise removal

What it fixes: colored speckles, the red, green and blue blotches that show up in dark areas of photos taken in low light or at a high ISO.

How it works: it smooths only the color of the picture, following its edges, and leaves brightness alone. Fine detail, texture and sharpness stay as they were. Above about 15 it also knocks out single colored specks first.

When to use it: most photos from phones and cameras benefit from a little: around 50 is a good start. It starts at 0 (off). Use less for clean studio shots; raise it for night photos. Too much can make small colored details (freckles, thin colored lines) fade into their surroundings.

Black-and-white pictures have no color noise, so this slider does nothing to them.

JPEG artifact removal

What it fixes: compression damage in JPEG files: the grid of little 8×8 squares, halos or "ringing" around sharp edges, and blocky, smeared color.

When to use it: pictures saved from websites or social media, and anything that has been saved as a JPEG more than once. It starts at 0 (off). Pictures that were never JPEGs (PNGs or TIFFs straight from a camera or renderer) usually don't need it.

The switch next to the slider picks how it's done:

Mode	How it works	Speed	Best for
Balanced	A classic filter that smooths flat areas while keeping edges, and evens out blocky color	Instant	Light damage, quick work, PCs without an NVIDIA card
Best quality (AI)	FBCNN, an AI model made for JPEG damage, run on your NVIDIA graphics card	About 1 second for a 2-megapixel picture, 6–8 seconds for 24 megapixels	Heavy damage, and whenever the result matters most

In Best quality, the slider tells the model how damaged the picture is: the higher it goes, the harder it cleans. 100 treats the picture like a very low-quality JPEG.

The first time you pick Best quality (AI), the app offers a one-time setup (see Getting Started). The mode you pick applies to every picture and is remembered next time.

While the AI works on a picture you've opened, the bottom panel says AI is working… a few seconds.

Detail recovery

What it does: sharpens fine detail and edges. Very small differences, which are usually leftover noise, are not boosted, so it doesn't bring the noise back.

When to use it: after JPEG artifact removal, which can leave a picture a little soft. Start low (20–40) and look at the picture at 100%. It starts at 0 (off). Too much gives bright outlines along edges.

One setting for every picture, or its own

The sliders on the main screen are the global settings. They apply to every picture that doesn't have its own value.
Open a picture (click it) and the same three sliders appear at the bottom. Moving one gives just that picture its own value for that slider. Next to each slider it says Global, or for example Custom · global 50 (it has its own value, and the global value is 50).
The ↺ button next to a slider sends that picture back to the global value. Use global for all does it for all three sliders. Set all to 0 gives that picture its own value of 0 on all three sliders (turning its clean-up off), without changing the global sliders.
Pictures with their own values get a red Custom badge on their card, and the count at the top says how many there are (for example 12 images · 3 custom).
On the main screen, Reset all to global clears every picture's own values. To do it for only a few, select them, right-click and choose Use global settings.
On the main screen, Set all to 0 moves all three global sliders back to 0 in one click.