How to Make a Dark Picture Seem Brighter

If you have taken a picture, then you may edit it if it seems too dark or blurry. I’m going to show you how to edit and brighten a darker picture. This is for beginners that are learning how to brighten and make the picture seem a bit more vibrant!

This is the original picture that I have taken and as you can see, it is a little dark. I took this in a local park area in the Chicago area where there were a bunch of trees that were causing some shadows and I wanted to make it a little brighter. So here are the steps that I took to take the picture and edit it.

1. So the first step to do is to open up Adobe Photoshop. As soon as you do so, then you will open the picture that you want to edit. Preferably a dark picture for this tutorial. So as I said before, this was a picture that I took. I like it, it’s just a bit darker than I would love. 

       2. Your next step is to make new layers that will help with brightening up the picture. When you click on the circled button, there will be               many options. You’ll want to scroll until you find the Brightness/Contrast button. Click on that and it will bring up in the Properties                   tag where there will be a few sliders.

        3. When you get to the sliders, you’ll start adjusting them and get the brightness that you like. For mine, I have the Brightness at +71 and the Contrast at -24. The higher you go with the Contrast, the darker that it will go. I have it set in the negatives, because that has a softer and lighter tone that it adds to the picture.

          4. Once you have gotten the brightness the way you want it, you will click on the same button that you did previously in Step 2. You will then scroll down to the Hue/Saturation option on the menu. Then it will make a layer for you to mess with it. I would recommend that you don’t mess with the Hue unless you really want some interesting colors in the picture. However I did mess around with the Saturation option and found that at +18, it has just the right amount of Saturation. When you have very little, then it will become black and white. When it has a lot of saturation, it almost looks like a heat seeking device. The Lightness slider is when you can adjust to how much ever light or dark that you want inside of the picture. I went just a little over 0 at +3. However, your picture may need a bit more depending on your preference.

             5. Then the final step is to repeat Step 2 and scroll then click on the Vibrance option. This will add a bit more color and brightness to the picture that you are editing. In the sliders, I have the Vibrance at +38 and this is because I wanted to add quite a bit of pop to the dark picture that I had at the beginning of the tutorial. Now, I did play around with with the Saturation a bit more than in the last step. I settled on +21. Again, how your numbers are on the sliders are completely up to your preferences

Then finally, this was the end result! Does it look so much more vibrant and brighter than the original picture that I showed you? Now you have a better idea of how to fix up the lighting if your picture seems too dark or even too bright! Have fun and #create !