Brighten a dark photo
Lift a dark photo without flattening it or blowing the highlights.
How this works
- It measures your photo first — the histogram, the colour cast, how much is crushed to black or blown to white, how much noise there is and how crisp the edges are. The starting settings come from those readings, not from a preset everything gets.
- Nothing is uploaded — the whole thing runs in your browser, including the full-resolution version you download. Your photo never leaves the device.
- It can’t invent detail — a badly out-of-focus or heavily compressed photo has lost information, and no amount of sharpening brings it back. This fixes exposure, colour and contrast, which is what most photos actually need.
A photo shot against a window, indoors at night, or into the sun comes back too dark — and the obvious fix, turning the brightness up, ruins it: the bright parts go to flat white while the dark parts turn grey and muddy.
This lifts the dark end specifically. The shadows are raised on a curve that fades out as it approaches the highlights, so the sky and any bright surfaces stay where they are. It then checks the result and backs the exposure off if the highlights would clip.
There is a second, subtler problem it avoids. Brightening a near-black pixel by multiplying its channels turns sensor noise into vivid colour speckle — the purple and green blotches you see in cheap "brightened" photos. Deep shadows here are lifted by addition instead, which keeps them neutral.
How to use it
- Drop the dark photo in.
- The exposure and shadow lift are set from how dark it actually is.
- Compare against the original with the slider.
- Push Brightness or Shadows further if you want, then download.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my photo still a bit dark?
Because brightening it further would blow the highlights. The tool simulates the result before applying it and reduces the exposure until less than 1.5% of the picture is pure white. You can override that with the Brightness slider if the highlights do not matter to you.
The bright areas look grey and flat now.
Turn Shadows down and Brightness up instead. Shadows lifts the dark end only; if you have pushed it a long way, the midtones come with it and the photo loses depth. A little Contrast puts it back.
It went blotchy and coloured in the dark parts.
That is noise being amplified, and it is a limit of the original file rather than of the tool — there was very little real signal there to begin with. Reduce noise helps; so does lifting the shadows less.
Does it work on a screenshot or a scan?
Yes. Anything the browser can open works, including scans, screenshots and phone photos.
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