The short answer
Drop the photo onto the editor below. Move Exposure to the right in small steps until faces or the main object have a natural brightness. If the corners or the background are still too dark, raise Shadows. If a window or the sky turns white, lower Highlights. Finally add 5 to 15 points of Contrast and check the result by pressing and holding the preview, which shows the original.
When the look is right, press Download. If you have more photos from the same place and time, add them all: the same settings are applied to every photo in the list, which keeps a series consistent.
Try it here: Photo Editor
Open the full tool pageWhy photos come out dark
A camera measures the light of the whole scene and picks one exposure for it. When the frame contains something very bright, such as a window behind a person, a sunny sky or a lamp, the camera lowers the exposure to keep that bright part from turning white. Everything else ends up too dark. Phones correct much of this automatically, but backlit portraits, evening shots indoors and photos of dark objects on a light background still often come out dark.
The other common cause is simply too little light: a room at night, a concert, a restaurant. Here the camera has to choose between a dark picture and a noisy, blurry one. Brightening afterwards works well, but it also makes the noise in dark areas more visible, so moderate settings give the most natural result.
Exposure, brightness and shadows are not the same
The editor has several controls that make a photo lighter, and each one changes a different part of the tonal range. Knowing the difference is what separates a natural correction from a gray, washed-out picture.
- Exposure works like opening the camera's aperture after the fact. It multiplies the light in the whole picture evenly, so colors stay saturated. It is the right first step for an underexposed photo. The scale goes up to two stops brighter or darker.
- Brightness lifts mainly the middle tones while black stays black and white stays white. Use it for a gentle lift when the photo is only slightly dark.
- Shadows brightens only the dark parts of the picture: faces in backlight, the inside of a room, dark clothing. The light parts barely change.
- Highlights does the opposite: lowering it brings back detail in bright areas such as clouds, a white shirt or a window that started to clip.
- Contrast spreads the tones apart again. After brightening, a photo often looks flat; a little contrast restores depth.
| Problem | First control | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Whole photo too dark | Exposure up | Contrast up a little |
| Backlit face, bright background | Shadows up | Highlights down |
| Slightly dull, not really dark | Brightness up | Saturation up a little |
| Sky or window turned white after brightening | Highlights down | Exposure down a step |
| Looks gray and flat after fixing | Contrast up | Sharpen a little |
Color after brightening
Dark indoor photos often have an orange or yellow cast from lamps, and dark outdoor photos taken in shade or at dusk tend to look blue. Once the photo is brighter, these casts become more obvious. Warmth corrects them: move it to the left to cool down an orange picture, to the right to warm up a blue one. Small values of 10 to 25 are usually enough.
If the colors look weak after brightening, add a bit of Saturation. Go easy with skin tones: above about 20 to 30 they quickly look unnatural. The Vivid filter is a good starting point for landscapes and food; for portraits, Soft lifts the shadows and tames bright areas, which flatters faces.
Mistakes to avoid
- Pushing Brightness alone to the maximum. The picture turns milky because the darkest tones are lifted without any contrast left. Use Exposure first, then Contrast.
- Ignoring the bright parts. After raising Exposure, check windows, skies and white clothing; if they lose all detail, lower Highlights.
- Over-sharpening a dark, noisy photo. Sharpen makes noise more visible. Keep it low, around 10 to 25, or leave it at zero for night shots.
- Editing each photo of a series differently. Add the whole series at once so they all get the same settings and look like they belong together.
- Overwriting your only copy. The editor saves a new file with -edited in its name, so your original stays untouched.
Quality, size and privacy
The edited photo has exactly the same resolution as the original. JPG and WebP files are saved at high quality and PNG without any loss, so one round of editing does not visibly reduce quality. HEIC photos from an iPhone and AVIF files are saved as JPG, because those can be opened everywhere.
The camera information stored in the original file (EXIF), such as the camera model, the date and the GPS location, is not copied to the edited file. That is good for privacy when you share the photo, but if you sort your photos by date in an album app, keep the original as well.
All processing happens in your browser. Your photos are not uploaded to any server, which matters for family pictures, documents and anything you would rather keep private.