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Lift dark or underexposed clips with Lumetri Color’s Basic Correction, judge the result on the waveform, and export without throwing away the shadow detail you rescued.
To brighten a video in Premiere Pro, select the clip, open Window → Lumetri Color, and in Basic Correction drag Exposure right until the midtones look natural. Then raise Shadows to open the dark areas, pull Blacks left so the image keeps some depth, and confirm it all on the Lumetri Scopes waveform before you export.
Adobe dropped “Pro” from the name with version 26.0, so the app now calls itself Adobe Premiere, but the tools are the ones people still search for under Premiere Pro. These steps follow Premiere 26.5, the latest release in Adobe’s release notes as of November 2026. Adobe has announced that the Lumetri Color panel retires in version 27.0; the first section below covers what changes and what stays.
If all you need is one clip a bit lighter and you would rather not build a sequence for it, the online video brightener runs in a browser tab. Everything else here is for people grading inside a Premiere project.
Choose Window → Workspace → Color, or open Window → Lumetri Color and Window → Lumetri Scopes separately. Park the playhead on a typical frame of the dark clip and select that clip in the timeline so Lumetri edits it.
In Basic Correction, click Auto. Premiere analyses the frame and sets the colour and light sliders for you, and the Intensity slider controls how much of that adjustment is applied. Use it as a draft and refine from there.
Drag Exposure right until faces, walls or the main subject reach a believable level. Exposure raises the whole tonal range and the bright end gets there first, so if highlights start to pile up at the top of the waveform, pull them back with Highlights or Whites.
Raise Shadows to bring out detail in the dark areas while the midtones stay mostly put. If the picture turns grey and flat, drag Blacks left until the deepest areas are dark again, and add a little Contrast if it still lacks punch.
Right-click in Lumetri Scopes, choose the Waveform (RGB) scope and set its type to Luma. For standard Rec.709 delivery, the trace should sit between 0 and 100 IRE: the darkest pixels just above 0 and the brightest at or below 100.
Choose File → Export → Media (Ctrl+M on Windows, Cmd+M on a Mac). Pick H.264 with the Match Source – Adaptive High Bitrate preset, scrub the preview to check the dark scenes, then click Export.
Adobe’s help pages say that from Premiere 27.0 the Lumetri Color panel is retired. The Lumetri Color effect itself stays, existing grades open unchanged, and you edit its settings in the Properties panel instead. A new Color Management panel takes over turning log and raw media into SDR or HDR, and a separate Color mode with its own grading controls is being tested in Premiere (beta). The beta also adds a Color section to the Properties panel with Exposure, Contrast, Pivot and Black sliders for quick fixes in Edit mode. The method on this page carries across: set exposure for the midtones, protect the highlights, place the blacks, and read the waveform.
Footage shot in a log profile looks dim and grey before it has been converted, and pushing Exposure on it treats the wrong problem. With colour management on, Premiere can convert recognised log and raw formats automatically through the Color Manage Auto Detected Log and Raw Media setting. For a clip it doesn’t recognise, use Override Media Color Space in the Color tab of the Modify Clip dialog, or load the camera maker’s LUT in Input LUT at the top of Basic Correction. Judge brightness only after that conversion.
Keep correction and style apart. The fx menu at the top of the Lumetri Color panel has Add Lumetri Color Effect, so one instance can hold the brightness fix and a second can hold any look, each renamed so you know which is which.
Your eyes are a poor meter for dark footage. Room light, monitor brightness and the size of the Program Monitor all change how bright a clip seems. The waveform does not care: left to right on the scope matches left to right across the frame, and height is brightness. Premiere’s Luma waveform runs from −20 to 120 IRE, where 0 is black and 100 is white for standard video.
The scope’s settings menu offers 8-bit, 10-bit, float and HDR scales. Clamp Signal hides values above 100 or below 0 IRE on the scope only; it changes nothing in the picture or the export. To actually hold a sequence inside broadcast limits, apply the Video Limiter effect from the Color Correction bin to a clip or as an export effect, with Clip Level at 100 (0 to 100 IRE, which is 16 to 235 in 8-bit).
Each Basic Correction slider works on a different part of the range. Exposure raises tonal values across the frame and stretches the highlights first. Shadows brightens the darker range and leaves the top largely alone. Blacks sets black clipping: left makes more of the image pure black, right makes less of it. Pushing Blacks to the right on top of a big Exposure move is a quick way to make a brightened clip look washed out.
For a typical underexposed clip, that adds up to a moderate Exposure increase, Highlights down to protect windows, lamps or sky, Shadows up to open the dark areas, and Blacks nudged left so the frame keeps a solid base. If the subject is dark against a bright background, the global sliders will fight each other; draw a mask on a second Lumetri Color effect in Effect Controls, or read our guide to brightening a backlit video.
Choose File → New → Adjustment Layer, drag the layer onto a track above the clips, select it, and grade it in Lumetri like any clip. Everything on the tracks beneath picks up the change. Even out the individual shots first, then put the shared correction on the adjustment layer, since the layer applies the same amount to every shot underneath it.
Brightening a dark clip brightens its noise too. Lumetri Color has no noise reduction control, and the Noise & Grain effects that ship with Premiere are designed to add texture, not remove it, so editors who need real denoising use a third-party plug-in. Without one, keep the shadow lift modest, let areas that hold nothing but noise stay dark, leave the Sharpen slider in the Creative section at zero, and go easy on saturation. Heavily compressed 8-bit phone footage has few shades in the shadows, and stretching them can show banding as well as noise.
Every export re-encodes the picture, and newly brightened shadows are where a low bit rate shows first, as blocky dark patches and banding. If the exported file looks worse than the timeline, check the bit rate before you question the grade.
There is more on keeping detail through each step in how to brighten a video without losing quality.
Starting Premiere, making a sequence and running an export is a lot of overhead for a single dark phone video. brighten.video handles that case in the browser: open the file, press Auto brighten or choose a quick fix (Night video, Dim room, Backlit or Slightly dark), and set Strength. Drag the Before and after divider to compare with the original.
Under More options there is a Histogram or Waveform readout and sliders that will feel familiar from Lumetri: Exposure, Brightness, Midtones (gamma), Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, Blacks, Whites, Saturation and Vibrance. It also has Noise reduction, an edge-aware smoothing of dark areas that is strongest on colour noise. Its Exposure works in linear light and rolls the highlights off on a smooth shoulder instead of clipping them.
Click Export video, pick Format, Size and Quality (Smaller file, Standard or High) in Export settings, and keep or drop the sound with Keep sound. The finished file is saved with Download video from the “Your video is ready” panel. The clip is processed on your device and never uploaded. The limits are worth knowing: export always re-encodes, the output is 8-bit, and it cannot invent detail that was recorded as pure black or clipped white. For a multi-clip edit, stay in Premiere.
There is a Brightness & Contrast effect in the Color Correction bin, but it shifts every pixel value at once, including the blacks. For dark footage, the Basic Correction sliders in Lumetri Color give far more control: Exposure for the overall level, Shadows and Highlights for each end of the range, and Whites and Blacks for the clipping points.
The black point has risen with everything else. Drag Blacks left until the bottom of the Luma waveform reaches 0 IRE again, then add a little Contrast. Raising Shadows instead of pushing Exposure hard also helps keep the darkest areas dense.
Auto in Basic Correction analyses the current frame and sets exposure, white balance and contrast, and Adobe says it works on log footage and clips with LUTs applied. On a deliberately dark night scene, check the waveform afterwards and lower Intensity if it has lifted the scene further than you want.
Put an adjustment layer above them (File → New → Adjustment Layer) and grade that, or grade one clip, copy it, select the others and use Edit → Paste Attributes with Lumetri Color ticked. Paste attributes when the clips need the same fix; use an adjustment layer when you also want to change it in one place later.
Not with its built-in tools. Lumetri has no denoiser and Premiere doesn’t include a dedicated temporal noise reduction effect, so the options are a third-party plug-in, another application, or a smaller shadow lift. Avoid sharpening dark, noisy footage, because it makes the grain more obvious.
For standard Rec.709 video, keep the Luma waveform between 0 and 100 IRE. Brightening does not mean filling the whole range: a night scene can have most of its trace low on the scale and still look right, as long as faces and key details read clearly.
Adobe says the panel retires in Premiere 27.0. The Lumetri Color effect remains, old projects open with their grades intact, and you adjust Lumetri effects in the Properties panel. Log and raw conversion moves to the new Color Management panel.
Yes. brighten.video brightens a single clip in your browser for free, with no account or watermark, and the file stays on your device. It suits a quick fix; Premiere is the better tool when the clip is part of a larger edit.