How to Brighten up Dark Photos in Lightroom Mobile

Sometimes you might have some dark and underexposed photos that you really want to fix. Don’t worry, when you think it can’t be saved, try these few easy steps in the Lightroom Mobile App and learn to brighten up your pictures in a few clicks!

To fix dark and underexposed photos you can mainly focus on 3 sliders: Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows. These sliders you can find under the Light panel inside the Lightroom mobile app.

Before you start: If the whole photo is too dark and underexposed, start with the ‘’Exposure’’ slider (step1). In case that just some areas of the image are a bit underexposed, adjust the ‘’shadows and blacks’’ first (step 2 and 3). This might fix the problem without you needing to do anything else.

Step 1# Exsposure

Start with sliding the exposure slider to the right. It is quite sensitive, so small changes might have a big effect on the image. Pull it up slowly until you reach a point you like, and focus on the details that you recover from the image. NOTE: don’t over do this, you can fix a lot of other dark parts in your picture with the next three steps.  

Step 2# Shadows

The second step is to recover the shadows. This slider is much less sensitive than the Exposure one, so you might need to move it all the way to the right. The SHADOWS slider effects only the dark areas of the image, you can use this slider to bring back lost details. 

Step 3# Blacks

The last step, you can adjust the Blacks. In a dark photo, you probably will need to slide it to the right. With this last step you can get rid of the last dark parts in your picture.

Probably you fixed now your dark and underexposed picture to your taste. If you compare the before and after images, you can really see the improvements you can get from making just a few adjustments. Keep in mind: the perfect exposure is mostly a personal preference, so you need to experiment.

Happy Editing!