About darken.video

Cameras are very good at guessing exposure until the scene is unusual: a beach at noon, a bride in white, a stage under spotlights, a child in front of a bright window. Then the clip comes out pale, glaring or washed out, and the only fix most people have is a brightness slider that makes it grey. darken.video exists to do that job properly, in a browser tab, without asking you to install an editor or send your footage anywhere.

What it does

• Auto fix samples frames from across your clip, measures where its tones sit and sets a correction that brings the level down while putting contrast back.
• Four ready-made looks cover the common cases: Overexposed, Bright sunlight, Blown-out sky and Dim it down, with one Strength slider.
• More options gives editors the individual controls (Exposure in stops, Highlights, Whites, Contrast, Gamma, Blacks and Saturation) and a Levels histogram of the current frame.
• A split before and after view, trimming, and MP4 or WebM export with the sound kept.

What it can't do

If part of the picture was recorded as pure white, the detail there was never stored, and no tool can bring it back. darken.video says so, and shows you how much of each frame is affected, rather than pretending. It also applies one correction to the whole clip: there are no masks or keyframes. For those, the guides on this site cover the full editors.

How it works

The site is a set of static pages and a small web app. When you open a video, your browser decodes it with the WebCodecs API and the open-source mediabunny library. Each frame is graded on your graphics chip with WebGL where available, using a tone curve that works in linear light, the way a camera's exposure does, and is encoded again at a high bitrate. The audio is copied across untouched. Unusual formats are converted locally with ffmpeg.wasm.

Promises

• Your video is never uploaded. There is no server that could receive it.
• No watermark, no sign-up, no trial and no paid tier.
• No ads. Visits are measured with Google Analytics, which you can switch off from Cookie settings in the footer; the privacy notice has the details.

Who it's for

Anyone with a clip that is too bright: holiday and wedding videos, school performances, property walk-throughs filmed against bright windows, product shots under hard light, and editors who need a quick correction without opening a project. If you'd rather use an app you already have, the guides for iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac walk through the built-in tools, and overexposure explained covers the theory.