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Brighten a dark photo

Lift the shadows of an underexposed picture and keep the highlights, on your own device.

Lighten a dark or underexposed photo without blowing out the sky: a tone curve with a live preview, plus contrast and warmth. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. The size limit is your device’s memory, and phones hold less; give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, and then it works offline.

Drop dark photos to brightenor click to choose files. Batches welcome.
    Working…

    Done

    Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.

    Indoor shots, backlit portraits and evening pictures often come out darker than the scene looked. Pushing a simple brightness slider in most apps adds the same amount to every pixel, so faces lighten but the window or sky behind them turns to flat white. This page brightens with a curve: shadows and midtones rise, while the brightest parts barely move and black stays black.

    It opens with Brightness at +35, a good start for a typical underexposed photo. If the result looks flat and grey, add a little Contrast; if a room lit by bulbs looks orange, move Warmth to the left; if colours look washed out after brightening, raise Saturation a touch. Press and hold Hold to compare to flick between the original and your version.

    Several photos from the same dark room or event can be dropped at once. The preview shows the first, and all of them get the same settings when you press Apply.

    How it works

    1. Drop the dark photos.
    2. Adjust Brightness, and Contrast or Warmth if needed.
    3. Press Apply.

    In your browser, not on a server

    Your browser decodes each photo (libheif or the Squoosh decoders step in for HEIC, AVIF and JPEG XL) and draws it on a canvas in your tab. Brightness is a gamma curve and contrast an S-shaped stretch around middle grey, both applied through a 256-entry lookup table per channel; warmth shifts red against blue, saturation mixes each pixel with its own Rec. 709 brightness, and sharpening is an unsharp mask: the picture plus a share of its difference from a blurred copy. The browser then saves the canvas as JPG, PNG or WebP.

    Compared with upload-based tools: Online photo editors upload the picture for a slider move a phone could do offline, and many add a watermark or keep the upload. Here the photos stay on your device, a whole batch gets the same settings in one go, and the result is compressed only once.

    Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.

    Questions

    Will brightening make the photo noisy?

    Somewhat: lifting shadows also lifts the grain the camera recorded in them. Moderate settings hide it well. Avoid sharpening a heavily brightened night photo, which makes the grain more visible.

    The sky is white in my original. Can it bring it back?

    No. Areas that are pure white in the file hold no detail to recover; darkening them only turns them grey. This page is for photos that are too dark, not too bright. For a too-bright photo, move Brightness to the left instead.

    Is it the same as the exposure setting in a photo app?

    Close. Exposure multiplies all light, like a longer shutter, and clips highlights; this curve behaves more like the Shadows and Brightness sliders in phone editors together, which is usually what a dark snapshot needs.

    Is the file uploaded anywhere?

    No. There is no server in this process. The page is a static file and the work is done by code running inside your browser tab. Give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use; then you can turn off Wi-Fi and it still works.

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