Low Quality Image Maker (Deep Fry)

Sometimes you want a picture to look worse on purpose: a crunchy "deep-fried" meme, a potato-quality reaction image, or a mock-up of what heavy compression does to a photo. This tool degrades images the way the internet does. It shrinks them, pushes saturation and contrast, oversharpens, then re-saves the JPEG again and again at very low quality so the blocky artefacts build up. Pick a preset or set every step yourself; it all happens in your browser.

How to use this tool

1. Choose one or more images.
2. Pick a preset: low quality, deep fried or potato.
3. For full control choose Custom and set the JPEG quality, number of re-saves, shrink, colour boosts, sharpening, noise and tint.
4. Keep "scale back up" for chunky pixels at the original size, or untick it for a small file.
5. Download the JPGs.

Formula

saturation: c′ = Y + (c − Y)(1 + s) · contrast: c″ = (c′ − 128)(1 + k) + 128 · sharpen: v + a(4v − neighbours)

Y = 0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B. s and k are the boosts as fractions (150% → 1.5), a is 1.5 × the sharpen percentage. After the colour steps the picture is JPEG-encoded at the chosen quality, decoded and encoded again for each pass, then enlarged without smoothing if you keep the original size. The deep-fried preset uses quality 6%, 8 passes, 70% size, +150% saturation, +60% contrast, 70% sharpening, noise and a warm tint.

Example

With the low-quality preset a 1200 × 800 photo is shrunk to 600 × 400, saved three times at 8% JPEG quality and blown back up to 1200 × 800 without smoothing, so every pixel becomes a 2 × 2 block inside 16 × 16 px JPEG blocks. A typical result is a few dozen kilobytes. Contrast −100% maps every channel to (v − 128) × 0 + 128 = 128, a flat grey.