Adjust brightness, contrast and color

Phone cameras do a good job in daylight, but indoor photos often come out dim, yellowish or flat, and product photos taken on different days rarely match. A few small corrections usually fix this without a full photo editor. The sliders here cover the adjustments people need most, and you can apply one set of settings to many files at once.

The editing runs in your browser and the photos are not uploaded.

How to use it

1. Add one or more photos.
2. Try Auto levels first. It is a quick starting point for flat or hazy images.
3. Fine-tune with the sliders: brightness, contrast, saturation, hue rotate, warmth, sharpness and vignette.
4. Press and hold the compare control to see the original, then release to see your edit. Use Reset to start over.
5. Download one file or all of them as a ZIP. Every file gets the same settings and keeps its original format.

What each slider does

• Brightness lifts or lowers all tones together. Large increases make blacks gray and the image flat, so pair it with a little contrast.
• Contrast stretches the distance between dark and light. More contrast looks punchy; less looks soft and matte.
• Saturation controls color intensity. Small steps go a long way: skin turns orange quickly, and a slight reduction often looks more natural than a boost.
• Hue rotate shifts every color around the color wheel. It is mainly a creative effect, for example turning a blue wall teal.
• Warmth moves the color balance between cool blue and warm orange. Use it to correct light: shade and cloudy days look blue, so warm them up; indoor bulbs look orange, so cool them down.
• Sharpness increases contrast along edges, in the style of an unsharp mask. A little makes details crisp. Too much creates bright halos around edges. It cannot rescue a photo that is out of focus or blurred by movement.
• Vignette darkens the corners to draw the eye toward the center. Keep it subtle for product photos.

When auto levels helps and when it does not

Auto levels looks at the darkest and brightest pixels in the photo and stretches the tones so they use the full range from black to white. Photos taken through a window, in fog, or scanned from faded prints often look clearer instantly.

It is less useful for photos that are meant to be dark or bright. A night street scene can become grayish and noisy, and a high-key portrait against a white wall can lose its airy feel. If the result looks wrong, press Reset and adjust by hand.

Batch editing tips

The same settings go to every file in the batch, which is ideal for a series shot in the same light: a set of product photos, rooms photographed for a listing, slides of a presentation. If your photos come from different places or times of day, split them into groups and edit each group separately.

Want to check the result closely? Load the original and the edited file into Compare two images and drag the slider. For a black and white or sepia version, use the black and white converter. If the edited files are large, shrink them afterwards with Compress image.