Darken Image Online
Make a photo darker with one slider: tone down an overexposed shot with the bright parts protected, or dim the whole picture, white included.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Make a photo darker with one slider: tone down an overexposed shot with the bright parts protected, or dim the whole picture, white included.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Drop a picture on the page and drag the Darken slider: the photo gets darker while you watch, and you stop where it looks right instead of guessing at a number. Call it an image darkener, a photo darkener, a picture darkener or a darkening filter - it is the same job, and you can darken images one after another without reloading the page. It works the same on a phone photo, a camera file, a screenshot or a scan, and it handles the two jobs people mean by "darken an image", which are not the same job at all. Sometimes a shot is simply too bright and needs winding back. Sometimes the picture is fine and has to go dark on purpose, because white text is going on top of it or it belongs behind a dark layout. The Bright areas switch under the slider chooses between them: Protect brings the midtones and highlights down and leaves white as white, Darken too takes the light out of everything, whites included.
Two more things sit beside the slider. Auto measures the picture and sets the slider to wherever its average brightness lands on mid grey, which is a good starting point for an overexposed photo. The compare button in the corner of the image shows the original for as long as you hold it, so you can check that the darker version is actually better and not just darker.
Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the page, paste one from the clipboard, or pick a file, then drag the slider to the right to add darkness by eye. Press Auto if you want the page to choose a starting point, hold the compare button to see where you started, and press Reset to go back to the original. Download as PNG for a lossless file, or JPG or WebP for a smaller one; a JPG you loaded downloads as a JPG by default. There is no signup, no upload and no watermark, and the file you save is the full resolution of the one you opened.
Protect bends a tone curve through the picture. Black stays black, white stays white, and everything in between is pushed down, with the strongest push landing on the midtones and the bright areas where an overexposed photo has gone flat. This is the one for a beach shot, a snow scene, a flash photo or anything taken into strong light: the sky and the highlights recover their shape, the colours deepen, and a white background in a product photo is still white afterwards. It is the exact reverse of the curve on the lighten image page, and 0 to 100 on the slider is a gamma of 1.0 to 12.0 if you like the number - the last stretch is steep on purpose, so mid grey ends up black and even a bright sky comes down to a deep grey, while the white in the picture is still white. Drag left of zero instead and the same curve runs backwards, which is how you undarken a picture here; to remove more darkness from a photo that came out too dark and get a clear image back, the lighten page is the one to open.
Darken too multiplies the light instead, all the way down to black at the end of the slider, so a white pixel comes down with everything else. That is what you need when the image has to read as dark: a hero photo that white text sits on, a background behind a dark interface, a screenshot that has to stop glowing next to dark-mode content. It is the dimmer, not the correction, and it is what the older version of this page did to every image whether you wanted it or not. The scale is weighted so the useful part is not squeezed into the first inch: halfway along takes three stops of light out of the picture, three quarters of the way takes six, and the end of the slider is black.
If you would rather scale brightness up and down by a plain percentage, the brightness changer does that, the exposure tool works in camera stops with separate highlight and shadow recovery, and gamma takes the exact exponent when a spec or a render pipeline named one.
Running a darkening curve down each colour channel on its own - the usual one-line implementation - drags saturated colour toward grey, which is why so many darkened photos come out muddy rather than moody. Here the amount is worked out once per pixel from its brightest channel and applied to all three in linear light, so a red stays the same red, only darker, and the picture keeps its colour as it comes down. Nothing can clip in either direction: every channel is at or below the value the curve maps, so no colour is crushed to black on the way.
A pixel that was recorded as pure white has no detail left in the file, so protecting it keeps it white rather than inventing a sky that was never captured. If large areas of your photo are blown out, the histogram viewer will show how much is stuck at the top, and no amount of darkening will bring back what the sensor did not record.
A photographed page or a faint pencil sketch is a different kind of "too bright": the paper is fine, the marks are too weak. Use Protect with a moderate amount, around 20 to 40, and the lines deepen while the page behind them stays light, because white is held in place and the mid greys of the ink move the most. Push much further and the paper starts to grey over, so back off when the writing is dark enough. For a harder-edged result the contrast editor pulls the two ends apart, and the black and white converter has a threshold that drops a scan to pure black and white.
The preview and the download run the same table over the pixels, so what you see on screen is what lands in the file, at the resolution you opened. With the slider at zero the image passes through untouched, byte for byte, and transparency is kept, so a PNG with a transparent background stays transparent. The compare view is a viewing aid and never ends up in a saved file.
None of this needs a server. The image is decoded and edited on your device through the canvas API, nothing is transmitted anywhere, and the page keeps working after it has loaded. For related edits there is the color grading tool for shadow, midtone and highlight colour, the vintage effect, and the silhouette maker when you want the subject all the way down to black.
Open the picture on this page, drag the Darken slider to the right, and download it. Nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded: the editing happens in your browser, the file comes back at its original size with no watermark, and you can copy it to the clipboard instead of downloading if you are pasting it somewhere.
Because the Bright areas switch is on Protect, which holds white in place on purpose so that an overexposed photo can be corrected without the whole picture going grey. Switch it to Darken too and the whites come down with everything else, which is what you want when the image has to look dark rather than correctly exposed.
Press Auto first. It sets the slider so the average brightness of your picture lands on mid grey, which is close to right for most photos shot into strong light, and then you can pull it back or push it further by eye. By hand, 20 to 40 is a gentle correction, 50 to 65 is a strong one, and anything past that is a dramatic, night-time result rather than a fix.
Yes, and Darken too is the setting for it. Somewhere between 30 and 55 usually leaves a photo readable underneath while white type stays legible on top, and you can keep going to black if the picture only has to suggest itself. Check it with the text in place, because a busy image may need more than a plain one.
The pixels are mapped through a table and written back at full resolution, so nothing is resampled and no detail is thrown away by the darkening itself. Saving as PNG keeps the result exactly; saving as JPG re-encodes it, which is a very small loss you would have taken anyway on a JPG. Very dark areas of an 8-bit image can show slight banding if you push the slider a long way, which is the format's limit rather than the tool's.
No. The photo is read straight from your device into the page, darkened there, and handed back as a download. It never leaves the browser, which matters here because the pictures people darken are often personal photos, screenshots with private information in them, or client work under an agreement that says nothing goes to a third-party server.