Last weekend I took the worst photo I could find on my phone—a blurry, underexposed shot of my dog mid-sneeze in a dark living room—and ran it through five different AI photo editing tools. The goal: see which ones could actually rescue a genuinely terrible image.

Not a slightly underexposed sunset. Not a portrait that needs minor skin smoothing. A truly awful photo that would normally go straight to the trash.

The Photo

Motion blur because the dog was sneezing. Underexposed because the room had one lamp on. Slight yellow colour cast from the warm lighting. Background clutter including an ironing board, laundry basket, and half-eaten sandwich on the coffee table. It’s bad.

Tool 1: Adobe Photoshop (Generative Fill + Enhance)

Adobe’s AI features have been improving steadily since they launched generative fill. The Enhance feature bumped resolution and attempted to reduce motion blur. Results: noticeable improvement in lighting and colour. The blur reduction was moderate—the dog looks less like an abstract painting but still clearly wasn’t sharp to begin with.

Generative fill did an impressive job removing the ironing board from the background when I selected it. The replacement background looked natural. The half-eaten sandwich vanished convincingly.

Cost: $22.99/month (Photography plan). Result: Best overall, but expensive for casual use.

Tool 2: Google Photos Magic Editor

Google’s been pushing AI editing hard in Photos. The enhance button improved exposure and colour automatically. The erase tool handled the background clutter reasonably well, though it left some artifacts near the edges of removed objects.

The motion blur? Basically untouched. Google’s AI improved what was there but couldn’t invent sharpness that never existed.

Cost: Free with Google Photos (15GB storage). Result: Good for casual fixes, doesn’t handle severe problems.

Tool 3: Remini

Remini specifically markets itself as an AI photo enhancer, particularly for faces. Since my subject was a dog, this was an interesting test.

It dramatically improved the image—too dramatically. My scruffy mutt suddenly looked like a professionally photographed show dog. The fur was unnaturally sharp and smooth. The eyes were enhanced to an almost creepy degree of clarity. The background remained blurry while the dog was razor-sharp, creating an obviously AI-processed look.

Cost: Free tier (limited), $9.99/week for premium. Result: Impressive but over-processed. Creates obviously AI-enhanced images.

Tool 4: Topaz Photo AI

Topaz has been the serious enthusiast’s choice for a while. Their denoising and sharpening are genuinely good. It recovered more detail from the blur than any other tool. The lighting correction was natural-looking. No over-processing or artificial sharpening.

The catch: it’s desktop software, not a mobile app or web tool. You need to download it, wait for processing, and the interface is functional rather than pretty.

Cost: $199 one-time purchase. Result: Best quality results but highest barrier to entry.

Tool 5: Samsung Galaxy AI Edit

I tested this on a Galaxy S24 Ultra. The built-in AI editing offered one-tap enhancement that improved exposure and colour balance reasonably well. The object eraser handled background cleanup. The blur reduction was minimal.

Cost: Free (built into Samsung phones). Result: Surprisingly capable for a built-in tool. Won’t match dedicated software.

The Honest Rankings

For this particular terrible photo:

1. Topaz Photo AI — Best recovery of actual detail
2. Adobe Photoshop — Best overall editing capability
3. Samsung Galaxy AI — Best value (free, built-in)
4. Google Photos — Good enough for most people
5. Remini — Impressive but creates fake-looking results

What AI Photo Editing Can’t Do

None of these tools can create information that doesn’t exist. A completely black area of an image gets filled with AI-generated content, not recovered data. Motion blur gets reduced but never fully eliminated. These are enhancement tools, not magic.

The companies behind these tools are investing heavily in AI capabilities. Organisations like Team400.ai work with businesses building similar AI-powered products, and the consensus is that generative enhancement will keep improving, but the fundamental limitation—you can’t recover data that was never captured—will persist.

The Practical Takeaway

For most people, the AI editing built into your phone (Google Photos or Samsung AI) handles 80% of fixable problems. If you regularly need to rescue problematic images, Topaz Photo AI is worth the investment. Adobe Photoshop is overkill for photo fixes alone but makes sense if you already subscribe for other editing.

And sometimes, the best AI tool is the one that convinces you to retake the photo with better lighting. My dog would have preferred that anyway. He did not enjoy being a test subject for five rounds of editing.