Three ways to brighten a dark photo
Exposure, Shadows and Brightness all make a photo lighter, but each changes a different part of it.
- Exposure multiplies all the light (+1 EV doubles it). Use it when the whole photo is underexposed.
- Shadows lifts only the dark tones, by up to 1.25 EV. Use it for faces in shade and dark foregrounds.
- Brightness raises the midtones with a curve and leaves black and white where they are. Use it for a gentle final touch.
Why the sky turns white — and how to stop it
Because exposure multiplies light, areas that were already bright hit the maximum value first and turn into flat white. The editor measures the share of pixels at 254–255 in any channel and warns you when it passes 1% of the photo and has grown by at least half a percentage point over the original.
When the warning appears, lower Highlights — at −100 bright tones are pulled down by up to 1.25 EV — or use less exposure together with more Shadows. Areas that were already pure white in the original stay white; no setting can bring back detail the camera never recorded.
Fixing a backlit photo
In a backlit photo the subject is dark against a bright sky or window. Raising exposure brightens the subject but blows out the background, so try Shadows +30 to +50 and Highlights −30 to −60 with little or no exposure change.
Auto brightness recognises this situation — the darkest 10% of the pixels are still dark while more than 15% of the pixels are very bright — and does exactly that: it lifts Shadows by 40, never lowers exposure, and pulls Highlights down when the sky is clipped.
Night and indoor photos: brightening brings out noise
Dark phone photos hide sensor noise in their shadows. Lifting them makes it visible as grain and coloured speckles, and above Shadows +50 the editor reminds you of this. This page does not remove noise.
Auto brightness treats a photo as a night scene when its median brightness is low but bright lights are present, and then raises exposure by at most +0.3 EV so street lights and signs do not wash out.
When a brightened photo looks washed out
Lifting dark tones reduces contrast, so a brightened photo can look grey. Add Contrast +10 to +20, or Vibrance +10 to +20 to bring colour back without pushing skin tones.
If the colours turned yellow or blue rather than pale, the colour of the light is the problem, not the exposure — correct it with Temperature, or use the photo colour correction page.
Brighten several photos at full resolution
Open a whole set at once: every photo keeps its own settings while you switch between them, and each is saved at its original pixel size up to the device limit (48 megapixels on computers). Nothing is uploaded, and there is no watermark.
To brighten many photos in one go, “Auto-correct each photo” (a beta for logged-in users) analyses every photo separately, so a dark photo gets more exposure and an already bright one gets little or none.