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Bring a too-bright picture back to a natural level, see exactly how much of it is beyond repair, and save a full-size copy. Nothing is uploaded.
Or choose one from your computer. JPEG, PNG, WebP or iPhone HEIC.Pick the too-bright picture from your photos or files.
Works with JPEGPNGWebPHEICand more
Stays on your device.
To fix an overexposed photo, open it in the tool above and press Auto fix. It reads the picture’s tones, lowers Exposure, pulls Highlights back and deepens Blacks so the photo has contrast again. If it still looks pale, choose Overexposed and raise Strength. Then select Export photo and Download photo to save a full-size copy.
What you can get back depends on how far the camera went. Bright areas that still show a little texture recover well. Anything recorded as pure white holds no detail in the file, so darkening turns it a flat light grey, whatever editor you use. Open More options before you spend time on it: Levels tells you how much of the photo is in that second group.
Drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP onto the tool, or choose one from your files or camera roll. HEIC photos from an iPhone open too. The picture stays on your device.
Under What needs fixing?, press Auto fix. For a picture that is pale all over, try Overexposed; for a white sky or window, Blown-out sky. Move Strength until it looks natural.
Choose Split under Compare and drag the divider across the brightest part. Open More options: under Levels, the line beneath the graph gives the share of the photo that is pure white.
Select Export photo. When Your photo is ready appears, select Download photo, or Share on a phone to put it in your photos. Your original file is not changed.
A photo is overexposed when the camera gathered more light than the scene needed, so its tones are pushed up towards white. You see three things at once: the brightest parts (sky, windows, white shirts, skin catching the sun) lose their texture, the darker parts turn a milky grey instead of black, and colours look faded. Phones cause it most often by metering a dark scene and brightening everything to compensate, which is why a person in front of a dark wall, or a snowy slope, so often comes out glaring.
The milky look is the part people underestimate. A pale photo usually needs its blacks deepened as much as its brightness lowered. That is why a plain brightness slider tends to make overexposed photos look dull rather than corrected, and why Auto fix changes several controls together.
Every pixel in a normal photo stores each colour as a number from 0 to 255. When more light arrives than 255 can describe, the camera writes 255 anyway. A cloud, a window or a sunlit forehead can end up as one patch of identical values, with nothing inside it. That is clipping, and it is the hard limit on fixing an overexposed picture: there is no hidden detail to reveal, because none was saved.
Tools that claim to “restore” a blown-out sky are either working from a RAW file (see below) or painting in a sky that was never photographed. darken.video does neither, and shows you how much of your photo is clipped so you can decide how far to go.
How much headroom you have depends on what the camera saved. A JPEG holds 8 bits per channel after the camera has already applied its own contrast curve, so whatever it clipped is gone. iPhone HEIC photos are similar for editing purposes: they are compressed, processed images, not sensor data, although recent iPhones also store extra brightness information for HDR display.
A RAW file (DNG, CR3, NEF, ARW and the like, or Apple ProRAW) keeps the sensor’s readings with more bits per channel and no curve baked in. A RAW photo that looks blown out often still has one or two stops of highlight detail, which a RAW editor’s Highlights slider can pull back. This tool opens JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC; a RAW file opens only as the JPEG preview the camera stored inside it, without the extra highlight detail, so if you shot RAW, recover the highlights in a RAW editor first.
The Photos app has everything needed for a mild case. Open the photo, tap the Edit button, then Adjust. Drag Exposure to the left, lower Highlights to bring texture back to the sky, and raise Black Point so the shadows stop looking grey. Brilliance pulled left also darkens the bright areas while lifting the darkest ones a touch. Tap Done; Revert brings back the original at any time.
The tool on this page works in Safari on iPhone too, and adds a measured correction and a readout of how much of the photo is pure white. Photos taken in HEIC open directly in Safari. Very large photos are saved at the largest size Safari allows on iPhone and iPad, which is about 16 megapixels; 12-megapixel photos keep their full size.
In the Light panel (Lightroom on a phone or the web) or the Basic panel (Lightroom Classic), lower Highlights first, then Whites, and only then Exposure; finish with Blacks for depth. Lightroom is the right choice when you have a RAW file, because its highlight recovery can use the extra data the RAW holds.
Open the photo, tap Tools, then Tune Image. Swipe up or down to choose Brightness, Highlights or Contrast, and left or right to set each one. Lower Highlights before Brightness, so skies recover without the whole picture getting murky. Snapseed is free on iPhone and Android.
Both are good editors that judge the result by eye. Use this page when you would rather not install an app or sign in, want an automatic starting point, or need to see the clipped share before deciding how hard to push.
Usually, as long as the important parts aren’t pure white. Lowering exposure and highlights and deepening the blacks brings back most bright pictures. Areas recorded as pure white have no detail stored, so they can only be darkened to grey, not restored.
Open it in Photos, tap the Edit button, then Adjust. Lower Exposure and Highlights, and raise Black Point if the shadows look grey. Tap Done. You can also open this page in Safari and press Auto fix.
An overexposed photo got too much light: it is too bright, the highlights lose detail and blacks look grey. An underexposed photo got too little: it is too dark and the shadows lose detail, often with visible noise when lifted. Overexposure is harder to fix, because clipped highlights hold no information.
Most often the camera is metering a scene with large dark areas and brightening everything to compensate. Tapping on the brightest part before you shoot, lowering the exposure slider a little, or turning HDR on usually stops it. A dirty or smeared lens can also make photos look washed out.
The photo is saved at its full size unless you choose a smaller Size under Export settings. PNG keeps every pixel exactly; JPEG and WebP use the Quality you set, 92% to start with. The only exception is very large photos in Safari on iPhone and iPad, which are saved at the largest size the browser allows.
No. It is opened, corrected and saved by your own browser. The saved copy also leaves out the location, camera and date details the original may carry.
Not separately: the correction applies to the whole picture. Blown-out sky lowers the brightest tones much more than the midtones, which in practice darkens a bright sky while leaving faces almost unchanged.