Brighten a dark photo

Brighten a dark photo

Your photo never leaves this page. Nothing is uploaded: it is opened and rewritten in your browser, and the page keeps working with the connection off.

Choose a photo

Or drop one on this box. Any photo your browser can show works. A HEIC photo from an iPhone opens in Safari; in other browsers, save it as a JPEG first.

How to brighten a photo

1. Choose a photo. Pick one, or drop one on the box. Each photo tool keeps working with the connection switched off once its page has loaded, and the browser test runs every tool that way.
2. Start with Exposure. Raise it until the faces or the main subject look right. Or press Try a starting point and work from its guess.
3. Lift the Shadows. This brings up the dark parts, like a face against a bright window, without washing out the sky.
4. Add a little Contrast. Brightening flattens a photo. A small push brings back depth.
5. Compare, then save. Move the line across the picture: the left side is the original. Then choose JPEG or PNG and save.

The photo brightener’s sliders run from −2 to +2 stops of exposure, 0 to 100 for shadows, and −100 to 100 for brightness and contrast.

What each slider does

• Exposure works like letting more light into the camera. It doubles the light for each stop, in the same linear light a camera sensor records, so colors stay natural. Bright areas are eased toward white instead of clipping, so a lifted sky keeps more of its shading.
• Shadows lifts the darker tones most and leaves the brightest almost untouched. Black stays black, so the photo does not turn grey.
• Brightness moves the middle tones up or down while black and white stay where they are. It is gentler than Exposure.
• Contrast spreads the tones away from the middle, or gathers them toward it when you lower it.

All four make one curve that is applied to red, green and blue alike, so colors keep their balance. The page reads each pixel’s values and writes them back changed, first on a smaller copy so the sliders respond at once, then on the full-size photo when you save.

Getting a natural result

• Go a little less far than looks right. A photo pushed until every corner is bright looks flat and grainy. Leave some shadow.
• Compare often. Your eyes adjust while you work. The line across the picture shows how far you have come.
• Watch faces and skies. Skin should look like skin, not chalk. If the sky turns pale, lower Exposure and lift Shadows instead.
• Fix the light before you crop or resize. Then crop it to the part you want and, if a site needs a small file, compress it.

Some browsers with strong anti-fingerprinting settings add faint noise to the pixels a page reads, as MDN notes; if a saved photo looks speckled, try another browser. This page does not fix color casts, blur or noise. A photo taken in very low light may not hold enough detail to look good brighter, whatever the sliders say.

What the saved file contains

• The photo at full size, with the curve applied, as a JPEG or a PNG. A clear area turns white in a JPEG.
• No camera, date or location data. The page draws the photo onto a canvas, which holds only pixels, and checks the file once more before offering it. Our guide to what Exif data is explains what that leaves behind.
• Nothing from your original changes. The original keeps everything, including its location, until you delete it.

Where Sealed helps, and where it doesn’t

It helps when the dark photo is one you would rather keep private. The photo editor’s Adjust tool has three sliders: Brightness, Contrast and Saturation. Saving an edit in the photo editor seals the result as a new item, so the original photo stays as it was. The photo editor works inside the vault, so the photo never goes back to your library to be fixed.

It doesn’t have Exposure or Shadows sliders like this page, and nothing on this page reaches your vault. Until you delete them, the originals stay in Photos, outside the vault.