Free to try · Brighten a photo
Brighten a dark photo
Indoor shots, evenings, a face lost in shadow. Drop the photo and Loupe lifts the light the way a photographer would, without inventing anything.
Try it here
Drop your dark photo
It opens in the editor with the request already typed. Change the words if you like, then send it. Your first edit is free.
Your photo never leaves your device. JPEG, HEIC, PNG, WebP, or camera RAW on a computer, up to 200MB.
Most dark photos aren’t ruined, just underexposed. The detail is usually still there in the shadows. The trick is bringing it up without washing everything out or making it look like a phone’s night mode.
What it does to your photo
First it looks: where the light falls, how much of the frame sits in shadow, and whether anything is already close to white. Then it moves real controls. Usually that means a little more exposure, a stronger lift in the shadows, and the highlights held back so a window or a lamp doesn’t burn out. If one part needs more help than the rest, like a face against a bright sky, it brightens just that area.
Every change lands on a slider you can see and nudge, with a line on why it was made.
Things you can say next
- “Brighter on her face, leave the background dark.”
- “It’s still orange from the lamps.”
- “A bit less. It looks washed out now.”
- “Keep the mood, I just want to see the details.”
When brightening can’t help
If part of the photo is pure black, there’s nothing in it to bring back, and lifting it only turns black into a noisy grey. Very dark phone photos get grainy as they’re brightened, too. Loupe can smooth that a little, but it won’t invent detail the camera never caught. If you shot RAW, use that file: it holds far more in the shadows than a JPG.
Can I brighten it by hand instead?
Yes. Every control the assistant uses is in the Adjust panel, so you can skip it and move the sliders yourself.
Is it free?
Your first edit needs no account at all. After that, a free account gets ten AI edits a month, and every slider in the editor is free to use by hand.
Will it change faces?
No. Loupe only changes light and colour, never the shape of anything, so people look exactly like themselves.
Does my photo get uploaded?
The photo stays in your browser. To see what it’s working with, the assistant gets a small preview, at most 512 pixels across, which is not stored.