Lighten Image Online
Make a dark picture lighter without blowing out the bright parts: one slider lifts the shadows and midtones and leaves white white.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Make a dark picture lighter without blowing out the bright parts: one slider lifts the shadows and midtones and leaves white white.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
A photo that came out too dark is the most common thing wrong with a picture, and this is the one-slider fix for it. Call it a photo brightener or an image lightener, say you want to brighten up, lighten up or even enlighten a picture: it is the same job, and it works the same on photos from a phone, pictures from a camera, screenshots and scans. Drop the image on the page and drag the Lighten slider to the right: the shadows and midtones come up, the picture gets lighter, and the parts that were already bright stay where they are. Drag left instead and the same curve runs the other way to darken it. The preview follows the slider as you drag, so you stop where the picture looks right rather than guessing at a number.
Two more things sit next to the slider. Auto measures how dark the image is and sets the slider for you, and you can pull it back from there. 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 lightened version is actually better and not just brighter.
Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the page, or paste one from the clipboard, then drag the slider or press Auto. Hold the compare button to see 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. Everything runs in your browser: the image is never uploaded, there is no signup, and no watermark is added.
A brightness control scales every pixel up by the same factor, so the bright parts of the photo hit pure white first and the sky or a window blows out before the dark part you cared about is light enough. Lightening uses a curve instead. Black stays black, white stays white, and everything in between is lifted, with the biggest lift landing on the dark and middle tones where an underexposed photo actually needs it. It is the midtone slider of a levels dialog, or a gamma adjustment, with a friendlier scale: 0 is your original, +100 is the strongest lift, and a typical dark photo wants something between 20 and 50.
The colours are handled with care too. Lightening each colour channel on its own makes saturated colours drift toward grey, which is why a lightened photo so often looks washed out. Here the curve is worked out once per pixel from its brightest channel and applied to all three, so a red stays the same red, only lighter, and the picture does not fade as it comes up. If a uniform lift is what you actually want, the brightness changer scales the pixels instead, and the exposure tool works in camera stops with separate highlight and shadow recovery.
Auto reads the average brightness of the picture and sets the slider so that average lands on mid grey, which is where a normally exposed photo sits. On a dark image that means a lift; on a picture that is already light it will darken instead, and on one that is already balanced it leaves the slider near zero and says so. It only ever sets the slider, so the result is never hidden from you: drag it a little further or back it off, and press Reset to return to the original.
Dragging left runs the curve in reverse and darkens the image, which is how you calm a photo that was shot into strong light or prepare a picture to sit behind white text. Dragging right is also the quickest way to whiten the background of a scanned page or a photographed document: the paper goes up toward white while the ink, which is close to black, stays put. The same lift is what you want for a product shot on a grey background that should have been white, or an indoor photo where the room reads darker than it felt.
There is a limit worth knowing. A pixel that was recorded as pure black has no detail in the file, so lightening turns it dark grey, not into whatever was there. If the important part of your photo is a solid black patch, the information was never captured and no tool can invent it. The histogram viewer shows how much of an image is stuck 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. With the slider at zero the image passes through untouched, byte for byte. Transparency is kept, so a PNG with a transparent background stays transparent, and the compare view is a viewing aid that never ends up in a saved file.
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 edits there is the contrast editor to change the spread between dark and light, the color grading tool for shadow, midtone and highlight colour, the hue shifter, and the black and white converter.
Open the picture here and drag the Lighten slider to the right, or press Auto and let it pick a starting point. The preview updates as you drag. Then download it as PNG, JPG or WebP at the original resolution. No account, no upload, no watermark.
Drop the JPG on the page, lighten it, and download. The curve itself loses nothing, since it runs at full resolution and pins black and white in place. If you want to avoid a second round of JPG compression entirely, choose PNG as the download format; for a photo that will be shared online, JPG is fine.
Brightening scales every pixel up by the same amount, so the bright parts of a photo reach white first and blow out. Lightening bends a curve through the tones: black and white stay fixed and the dark and middle tones are lifted the most. On an underexposed photo lightening brings up the subject without losing the sky; brightening tends to lose the sky first.
Because most tools lighten each colour channel separately, which pushes saturated colours toward grey. This one works out the lift from the brightest channel of each pixel and applies the same lift to all three, so colours keep their saturation as they come up. Hold the compare button and you will see the reds and blues stay the same colour, only lighter.
Up to a point. The slider at +100 lifts mid grey most of the way to white, which is enough for a badly underexposed shot. What it cannot do is invent detail that was never recorded: a pure black area stays a flat patch, and the noise in the shadows comes up along with the picture. Auto is a good place to start on a very dark image, and the histogram viewer shows how much of it is stuck at black.
Yes. JPG, PNG and WebP all load, transparency is preserved, and the alpha channel is never touched by the curve. A transparent background stays transparent in the download.
No. The image is decoded, lightened 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.