Free · runs in your browser
Open a dark photo, press Auto brighten and compare it with the original before you save. The picture is lightened in your browser and never leaves your device.
To brighten an image, open it in the tool above and press Auto brighten. It measures how the light is spread across your photo and lifts the exposure and shadows until the middle tones sit at a natural level, while bright skies and lamps are rolled gently into white instead of being clipped. Turn on Before and after to check, then select Export photo and Download photo.
The same controls work whether you call it brightening, lightening or fixing an underexposed picture: a quick fix for the usual problem, a Strength slider, and a full set of sliders under More options for exact work. Your original file is never changed. You get a new copy at full size, in JPEG, PNG or (in browsers that can write it) WebP, saved without the location, camera and date details that phones tuck into photos.
Drop the picture onto the tool or choose Select photo. JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF open in every modern browser; iPhone HEIC photos open where the browser can read them, which in practice means Safari.
Auto brighten (A) reads the photo and sets a natural lift. For a known problem pick Night photo, Dim room, Backlit or Slightly dark, then drag Strength until it looks right and compare with Before and after (B).
Select Export photo. Under Export settings choose JPEG, PNG or WebP, the Quality and the size; Full size keeps every pixel. When Your photo is ready appears, choose Download photo, or Share on a phone.
Most quick photo editors offer one brightness slider that adds the same amount to every pixel, or scales the stored values directly. Dark areas come up, but so does pure black, and the result looks foggy and flat. The reason is that image files are gamma encoded: a mid-grey wall that reflects 18% of the light is stored at about 46% of full scale, so “add 20%” means something very different in the shadows than in the highlights.
Auto brighten combines these for you, and every value it sets is visible and editable under More options, along with a Histogram of the photo, Highlights, Blacks, Whites, Contrast, Saturation, Vibrance and Noise reduction.
The classic dark photo is a person standing in front of a bright window, a sunset or a white sky. The camera exposed for the background, so the face is a shadow. Brightening the whole picture evenly fails here, because the sky is already near white and clips long before the face is bright enough.
Press Backlit instead. It pushes Shadows hard, pulls Highlights down and adds only a little exposure, which changes the relationship between subject and background rather than lifting both. If the window still looks white, open More options and lower Highlights further; if the face looks flat, add a few points of Contrast. A face that was recorded as solid black has no detail left to recover, but most phone photos hold far more in the shadows than they show.
Both phones have capable editors built in, and for a single quick fix they are the obvious place to start.
Open the photo, tap Edit, then the adjustment dial. Tap the magic-wand Auto button for a quick fix, or scroll through the sliders: Exposure and Brilliance brighten the picture overall, Shadows opens up the dark areas, and Highlights pulls bright ones back. Tap Done to save; you can revert later because the Photos app keeps the original.
Open the photo in Google Photos, tap Edit, then the adjust tools. Brightness and Shadows do most of the work, with Highlights and White point for the bright end. Samsung Gallery has a similar Adjust panel with brightness, exposure and shadow controls. Tap Save or Save as copy.
Use the tool on this page when you want the same result on any device, a before-and-after split to judge it, a histogram to see what is clipping, or a copy without location data to send to someone. It also opens photos sent to you as files, screenshots and pictures from a camera’s memory card, and saves them at full size as JPEG or PNG.
Nothing is uploaded. The browser decodes the picture, the grading runs on your device’s graphics chip, and the new file is written straight back to your downloads or your phone’s share sheet. The saved copy carries no EXIF, GPS or XMP data, so the place a photo was taken and the camera details are not passed on to whoever receives it. If the original carried a location, the tool says so in the export panel.
The same engine brightens video frame by frame, with sound kept and the same before and after. If the photo came from a clip that is also too dark, see how to fix a video that is too dark, or the night video enhancer for footage shot after dark.
Use Exposure or Shadows rather than a flat brightness boost, keep Full size under Export settings, and save as PNG (lossless) or JPEG at 90% Quality or above. The only loss is the noise that brightening reveals, which Noise reduction smooths.
In the Photos app, tap Edit, then the adjustment dial, and raise Exposure, Brilliance or Shadows. Or open this page in Safari, choose Select photo, press Auto brighten and save the copy with Share.
Yes. Auto brighten measures the light in your photo and sets exposure, shadows and highlights for a natural result. It runs on your device; nothing is sent to a server, and you can change every value it picks.
No. The new photo is saved at its original pixel size unless you pick a smaller size under Export settings. The one exception is Safari on iPhone and iPad, which caps very large photos at about 16.7 megapixels.
In Safari, yes: it reads HEIC, and the result is saved as JPEG, PNG or WebP. Chrome, Edge and Firefox can’t read HEIC files, so set the iPhone camera to Most Compatible, or export the photo as JPEG first.
No. The copy is written without EXIF, GPS or XMP metadata, so the place it was taken, the camera model and the date are left out. The colour profile is kept so it looks the same.
Not yet: the tool opens one photo at a time. Each takes a few seconds, and Adjust again keeps your settings if you want to fine-tune before saving another version.