About the Brightness/Contrast Editor tool
Brighten dark shots and add punch to flat ones with live brightness and contrast sliders — the two adjustments that fix 90% of everyday photos.
Adjustments are applied in the browser as you move the sliders. The original file is never uploaded and never leaves your device.
How to use it
- Add your image.
- Adjust the settings and watch the live preview.
- Download the result.
About the brightness and contrast effect
This applies the two most fundamental tonal adjustments.
Worth knowing
Brightness shifts every tone up or down together. Contrast stretches the distance between light and dark. They are frequently confused, and reaching for the wrong one is why an underexposed photo often ends up looking washed out.
An underexposed photo usually needs brightness. A flat, hazy photo usually needs contrast. A photo that is both dark and flat needs a small amount of each rather than a lot of either.
Reading the image before you adjust it
Before touching either slider, decide which problem you actually have. Look at the darkest and lightest parts of the photograph. If the darkest area is gray rather than black and the brightest is gray rather than white, the image is flat and needs contrast. If everything is uniformly too dark or too light, it is an exposure problem and needs brightness.
The order matters. Set brightness first so the overall level is roughly right, then apply contrast. Doing it the other way round means the contrast adjustment operates on the wrong tonal range and you end up correcting your correction.
Be conservative on JPGs. A JPG stores 8 bits per channel with compression already applied, so there is less tonal data to stretch than in a RAW file. Large corrections reveal banding in skies and gradients — visible steps where there should be a smooth transition. Several small adjustments, saved once at the end, damage the image far less than one heavy one.
Common mistakes
- Raising brightness on a flat image, which grays it out instead of fixing it.
- Pushing contrast until highlights turn pure white, which destroys detail permanently.
- Making large corrections on a JPG, where limited tonal data shows banding quickly.
Questions people ask
Which should I adjust first?
Brightness, to get the overall level right, then contrast to add separation.
Why does my photo look washed out?
Usually too much brightness and not enough contrast. Try lowering brightness and raising contrast instead.
Can I recover blown-out highlights?
No. Areas already pure white contain no data to recover.