Image Brightness Increaser
Brighten an underexposed photo or pull back an overexposed one: one slider, live preview, full-quality download.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Brighten an underexposed photo or pull back an overexposed one: one slider, live preview, full-quality download.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Call it a brightness increaser, decreaser, adjuster or changer - it is one slider over your photo or picture. Most images that need it are underexposed: shot indoors, against a window, at dusk, or with the phone metering for a bright sky and leaving the subject in the dark. Drop one here, drag the slider to the right, and the whole picture lifts. Drag left instead to decrease it and pull back a shot that came out too bright. The preview follows as you drag, so you stop where it looks right rather than guessing at a number.
The slider runs from -100 to +100 and 0 is your original, untouched. At +100 every channel is doubled; at -100 the image goes to black. Most rescued photos want somewhere between 15 and 50.
Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the page, or paste one from the clipboard, then drag the slider. Download as PNG for a lossless file, or JPG or WebP for a smaller one. Everything runs in your browser: the image is never uploaded, there is no signup, and no watermark is added.
There are two ways to make an image brighter, and they do not look the same. Adding a fixed amount to every pixel lifts the blacks along with everything else, so the picture goes milky and flat - the shadows turn grey and the whole thing looks hazy. Scaling multiplies instead, so a pixel at 40 and a pixel at 200 keep their relative distance and the photo brightens the way more light would have brightened it.
That is what this tool does, and it is why it works on underexposed photos rather than just fading them. The trade-off is at the very top: once a channel reaches 255 it stops, so pushing hard into an already bright area flattens the highlights. If the result starts looking blown out, back the slider off and add a little contrast instead, or use the lighten image tool, which bends a curve through the tones so white stays put while the dark parts come up.
Dragging left scales everything down. Reduce the brightness of a photo shot into strong light, or one taken with the exposure compensation left too high, and it comes back. It is also how you prepare an image to sit behind text, since a darker picture lets white type read clearly over it. Note that detail already lost to pure white cannot come back: if the sky in your photo is a flat white patch, darkening turns it grey rather than restoring the clouds. The histogram viewer shows how much of an image is already clipped at either end.
The preview and the download run the same curve over the pixels, so what you see is what you save, at the full resolution of the file you loaded. Transparency is kept: a PNG with a transparent background stays transparent. All of it happens on your device through the canvas API, so no image is transmitted anywhere and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.
For related work there is the contrast editor to change the spread between light and dark, the image tinter to cast a photo toward a colour, and the black and white converter.
Open the photo here and drag the slider to the right. The preview updates as you drag, so you can stop when the subject is readable rather than guessing at a percentage. Then download it as PNG, JPG or WebP at the original resolution. No account or upload is involved.
The same way as any other image - drop the JPG on the page, drag the slider, and download. Keeping JPG as the output format is fine for photographs; choose PNG instead if the picture has text or sharp graphics you want kept exactly.
That is what happens when brightness is added rather than scaled: the blacks lift along with everything else and the picture goes hazy. This tool multiplies instead, which keeps the dark tones dark. If a brightened photo still looks flat, it usually needs a little more contrast rather than less brightness.
Yes, drag the slider left of zero. Everything scales down, and at -100 the image is black. It is the fix for a shot taken into strong light, and it is how you prepare a picture to sit behind white text.
No. An area that is already pure black has no detail left to scale up, and one that is pure white has nothing to bring back by scaling down - both are flat patches in the file, not dark or bright versions of something. Brightness helps where there is still some variation to work with.
No. The image is decoded, adjusted and encoded in your browser, at preview and at full download resolution alike. Nothing is sent to any server, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page is open.