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How to make dark photos brighter?
Photos probably take a huge part of our lives. After all, holding a phone in your hand makes taking pictures easier and much faster! You don’t need to have a professional camera or to be a professional photographer to make your pictures look good. Walking down the beach, staring at amazing scenery, you would want to capture this wonderful moment here and now, right? All you’ve got to do is to take your phone and take photos right here right now! However, photos do not always look like what we see with the naked eye, so we often get disappointed and just delete “bad” dark photos out of our phone gallery. Well I’ll tell you one secret - you don’t have to do that! In this article you will discover several ways of how you can easily and quickly adjust a photo on your phone in seconds.
How to brighten a photo?
So you probably should have had such situations when you take a great shot although your whole picture looked dark and blurry. There is a simple fix for that! One of the easiest and the most simple ways is to adjust the camera settings in the direction you want when taking a picture. This means that you’ve got to act before you take a shot. Just before you press the button, aim the camera at the desired object and then tap your finger to make the camera focus on this object. A circle or a square will appear (depending on the phone you are using) and a little “sun” icon on the side. Now you can easily raise or lower the brightness of the photo with your fingers - so you can brighten the photo so easily! Easy, right? However, keep in mind that too much brightness in a photo won’t look great either, so we recommend playing with brightness settings with extreme caution.
How to edit dark pictures in a photo library?
Another easy way is to use the photo editing settings already available on your phone. It's really easy and simple, just open the phone, go to the photo gallery, select the desired photo, press edit - you have all the necessary settings to edit your photo on the go. These settings may seem confusing and difficult to understand for a newbie so we won’t be talking about all of them, we came here for brighter photos, remember? So here are some settings to help us adjust the brightness of the photo:
EXPOSURE - One of the easiest ways is to slide to the right until the photo is bright enough. Just don't overdo it, as too much exposure can turn the yellow color to faded yellow or even white at all. This setting is a great help when there is a lack of light in a photo, to brighten the objects or to get more white light coming up.
BRIGHTNESS - This is the second setting that is probably one of the most popular settings that people use. This one is a great choice when a photo is lacking light. The principle of brightness setting is very similar to exposure, only here we illuminate the whole photo by allowing more light into the whole shot, on the other hand the exposure setting we use to illuminate only yellow/white colors.
We always recommend using the Brightness setting first. You can go for the Exposure setting if the brightness doesn’t help you to achieve the final result you are going for. Also you can use both to experiment :)
With both exposure and brightness, you can easily and strongly brighten the desired photo without compromising photo quality. Experimenting with these settings is so much easier than you think!
P.S The names of these settings may vary depending on the phone you are using, in our case we use the Iphone.
The result of the image before after :)
How to brighten a dark photo with Lightroom?
Another way of how we edit dark pictures to make them brighter is to use the Lightroom application.This app is available for free in your mobile app store both for iPhones and Androids. Also it’s available for desktop although you’ve got to purchase their subscription to use it on desktop (you can always go for a free trial if you’d like to check it out). It is one of the most popular photo editors, used by both professional photographers and enthusiasts who want to tweak the photo a little bit. Since we are talking here only about photo brightness, we will not talk about the whole app and its possibilities, because there are an infinite number of them here and it would take us a whole book to talk over each and one of them. Let’s talk about brightness settings in the mobile version of Lightroom. You will need to download the Lightroom app from the app store or just by going to the official Adobe Lightroom page. Upload the photos you want to the downloaded app. And then the magic begins!
We select the desired photo and upload it to Lightroom first. Then we click on the “Light” settings option. Here you’ll see the following settings appear:
Exposure
Contrast
Highlights
Shadows
Whites
Blacks
Contrast
Highlights
Shadows
Whites
Blacks
We are going to need only two settings to use here: exposure and whites. It is recommended to first slightly increase the “Exposure” setting so that all the elements are visible in the photo, then use “White” to increase the whites in the photo. Remember this, with “Exposure” we adjust the brightness of the photo, then if we still need it, we use “White” to increase white color in the photo. Make these adjustments and your picture will look way better! Really simple, right?
Before:
And After:
How to make dark photos brighter with Presets?
Probably one of the easiest ways to make dark photos brighter is to use pre-made photo settings - presets created by a professional, and we’ll explain why it’s the best choice right away. Well you probably already understand that photos come in all sorts: taken during the day time or at night, indoor or outdoor, in the winter or in the summer. Their color gamut is always different and each time you’re going to have to re-adjust your photos to make them look better. And still you probably won’t be able to achieve that “perfect shot” until you’re a professional editor yourself. So here come Lightroom Presets, an already very popular product among influencers on instagram or other social media, bloggers, or even professional photographers around the world and it’s gaining its popularity among us, simple people that love beautiful photos. It’s important to mention that you’re going to forget about long lasting photo editing or trying to make your photos look great and not succeeding in this. Applying a preset in the Lightroom will take you less time than reading this sentence :)
Perhaps you already have the question on your mind: is it really worth buying presets if you just want to lighten a dark photo a little? Let’s take a short step back where we talked about photo correction using Exposure and White settings in the Lightroom app. So in order to brighten a photo you only need a few settings, but if you want that "wow" effect when the photo becomes bright, the objects are clear, the skin is smoother, and the photo itself comes to life? Then you’ve got your answer - definitely YES - because photos with professional presets look like they were taken by a professional and even your simple selfies can go from average to amazing in just one click.
I think you won’t believe me until you try this yourself. This is what we, humans do. And that’s perfectly normal.
So here is an original photo:
and with the preset:
You don’t believe me, right? Then try one of our brightening presets for free! All you’ve got to do is to download it!
FREE PRESET
Enter your email in the form that appears after entering the article (missed the form? No worries! Click on the icon in the bottom) and receive your preset right away! Don't know how to install? No problem! Follow this link
Did you like it? Here you can buy a full presets pack with 15 (you hear me?? It’s 15!!) different presets.
MAGIC OF THE PRESET:
♡ Brightens colors not changing the base
♡ Brightens and softens skin
♡ Brightens and whitens background
♡ Perfectly suitable for instagram pictures, everyday photo edits, people & food & environment photography.
♡ Brightens colors not changing the base
♡ Brightens and softens skin
♡ Brightens and whitens background
♡ Perfectly suitable for instagram pictures, everyday photo edits, people & food & environment photography.
Can’t get enough of it? I would like to recommend our best presets for your photos to look brighter, cleaner, pro-looking and WOW. (It’s editor’s choice - and editor never makes bad choices)
Professional edits for your perfect light bright white photos! Portraits, selfies, home and interior, pets, details and pretty much everything will look good with our Light & Airy presets collection! Create that dreamy instagram look you always wished for with just a blink of an eye.
White presets are probably one of the most suitable presets to lighten and enliven a dark photo
♡ White becomes even whiter
♡ Corrects contrast
♡ Perfect for instagram bloggers, indoor and outdoor photography, object or people shots.
IG Style Presets, perfectly illuminates and clarifies objects, and works great for all kinds of photos!
Brings out the best features of the photograph
♡ Brightens and softens skin
♡ Makes your tan look natural and smooth
♡ Intensifies colors
♡ Perfect for instagram babes, fashion bloggers, girls and boys on social media.
Clean Feed The name says it all - the photo becomes "clean" and beautiful
♡ Cleans yellows
♡ Brightens and softens skin
♡ Smoothens face
♡ Makes hair shiny
♡ Corrects contrast
♡ Perfect for instagram bloggers, indoor and outdoor
Back to Black Presets, works great for those who love less colors, dramatic look and a sharp photo feel
♡ Desaturates a few colors
♡ Tanned skin looks even better
♡ Great contrast and clarity
♡ Perfect for unique photo lovers and ig bloggers
We hope the article was helpful and you found what you were looking for. Don’t stop capturing your most amazing moments
With love,
Andrew