How Outpaint works

What outpainting actually is

Outpainting is the opposite of cropping. Instead of cutting your photo down to fit a shape, it invents believable new surroundings for it — more sky above a building, more sand either side of a beach, more wall behind a portrait — until the picture fills the size you asked for. The pixels you uploaded are copied through untouched, and only the empty space around them is generated.

That is what makes it different from the two things people usually try first. Cropping throws away part of your photo. Stretching distorts everything in it. Outpainting adds material that was never in the frame, so nothing has to be lost or squashed to change the shape.

Step 1 — Upload your photo

JPEG, PNG and WebP files up to 10MB. Your upload is processed and then discarded — it is not kept, and it is never used to train anything. If you are on an iPhone shooting in HEIC, export as JPEG first.

Step 2 — Choose your resolution

There are presets for the sizes people actually need — 1080 × 1920 for a phone wallpaper, 1920 × 1080 or 2560 × 1080 for a desktop, 1080 × 1080 for a square post, 3840 × 2160 for 4K — or you can type any custom size up to 4096 pixels per side.

A tip worth knowing: the closer your target shape is to the shape of your photo, the less the AI has to invent, and the more convincing the result. Turning a landscape photo into a tall 9:16 wallpaper asks for a lot of new picture, so expect to regenerate a few times. Under Outpaint Options you can also set an anchor, which decides where your photo sits in the new canvas — anchor to the bottom and the new space is added above, which is usually what you want for a wallpaper.

Step 3 — Preview free, then unlock

The AI runs before you pay anything. When it finishes you get a blurred preview of the result, and a Regenerate button that costs nothing. Every regeneration uses a fresh random seed, so it is a genuinely different attempt rather than the same image again. Keep going until the shape and composition look right, then pay £1.50 to unlock the full-resolution file. If you never like it, you never pay.

The preview is deliberately small and heavily blurred on our server, not just blurred in your browser — there is no hidden full-quality copy to extract from it.

What you get for £1.50

• The full-resolution image at exactly the size you chose, as a download.
• A private link that keeps working for 30 days, so you can come back for it.
• No account, no subscription, and no charge if you walk away at the preview.

Things it deliberately will not do

It will not add people who were not in your photo. If someone is cut off at the edge of the frame the AI may complete them, but it never populates empty background with invented strangers. It also will not redraw your subject: the original is composited back over the generated canvas, so what you uploaded is what you get back, surrounded by more of the scene.

When it goes wrong

The usual failure is a “collage” — the new background does not quite continue your photo, and the two read as separate images butted together at the seam. It happens most when the target shape is very different from the photo's shape. Because previews are free, the fix is simply to regenerate, or to pick a target closer to your original proportions.

If our AI provider is unavailable and we fall back to a plain-colour fill, that is not the product and you are not charged for it — you are told on screen and given the file free. The same goes for anything our content screening blocks: no payment is taken.

A free option, if you do not need AI

Under Outpaint Options there is a “stretch to fill” checkbox. It resizes your photo to the target dimensions with no AI at all, which distorts the image but costs nothing. Useful when you just need a file of a certain size and do not care what it looks like.

More on data handling in our Privacy Policy, and on refunds in our Refund Policy.