How to Brighten a Dark Wildlife Photo

By Carol Leather

Don't delete that dark photo.

One November morning a red kite drifted over the trees at the back of my garden, before the sun was properly up. I stood on the lawn in the cold, dodging my own branches, and followed it with a 500mm lens at 1/800. On the back of the camera the bird looked half lost in shadow against a hard bright sky. A few years ago I would have deleted it on the spot.

I didn't. Both kites from that morning came back, and they are the worked examples on this page.

A wildlife shot that came out too dark is one of the most rescuable things in your whole collection. The detail is usually still there, sitting in the shadows, waiting for you to lift it out. This page is about the afterwards: the photo you have already taken, the one that came home too dark, and the handful of moves that bring it back.

Start with the file you have

RAW files give you the most room to recover a dark photo. A RAW file holds far more detail in the shadows than a JPEG, so you can brighten it a long way before the image starts to break up. Both kites that morning were shot in RAW, and that is the only reason I could later drag the second one's shadows all the way up and have it hold together.

If all you have is a JPEG, or a photo from your phone, you can still brighten it. You have less room to push before noise and banding show up, so you work more gently and stop sooner. The steps below are the same either way.

Lift the exposure first

The exposure slider is the first move. It brightens the whole image at once, so it does the heavy lifting before you touch anything else.

The first kite, the one in the early golden light, came off the camera about a stop dark. One move fixed most of it. I lifted the exposure to +0.95, close to a full stop, and the bird rose out of the gloom in a single drag. Everything after that was fine-tuning.

Stop before the brightest parts start to glare. You are bringing the subject to a natural brightness, not flooding the frame with light. If the sky turns to flat white, you have gone too far. Ease back.

Recover the shadows

The shadows slider lifts only the darkest parts of the photo, and sometimes it does almost all the work on its own.

The second kite from that morning proves it. It had just taken off from the bare branches of the tree, its body in shadow against a bright sky. Lifting the whole exposure would have blown that sky to white to rescue the bird. So the exposure barely moved, +0.10, and the shadows did the job instead: I pushed them to +51. Detail returned under the darker, shadowed wing, and the sky stayed blue behind it.

Go as far as the photo needs, then stop. Pushed too far, lifted shadows turn flat and grey, and any noise hiding in the dark comes up with them. On a RAW file you have a surprising amount of room. On a JPEG, far less.

Pull the highlights back

Brightening a photo can blow out the bright areas: a pale sky, sunlit feathers, the shine on water. The highlights slider brings those back.

On both kites the November sky was brighter than the bird. I pulled the highlights back to −16 on each, and the detail returned to the sky and to the sunlit edges of the wings. For the very brightest patches, the whites slider does the same at the extreme end. Work the highlights first, and reach for whites only if a bright area is still featureless.

Add a little contrast

Brightening tends to leave a photo looking slightly flat. A small lift of contrast puts the depth back and helps the subject stand out from the background.

The golden kite took +8, the one against the branches +16. Enough to separate each bird from its background, not so much that the shadow detail I had recovered crushed away again. Keep it subtle. Too much contrast undoes the rescue.

Tidy up the noise

Brightening a dark photo brings out grain, especially from a high ISO in low light. Both kites were shot at ISO 640 in early light, and lifting them brought the grain up plainly in the bare blue sky.

Denoise at 50, with Raw Details on, smoothed it away. The grain was clearest in the bare blue sky, where there was no feather detail to hide it. Use a light hand. Pushed too hard, noise reduction softens the fine detail that makes a wildlife photo, the texture of the feathers, the catchlight in the eye. Reduce the grain until it stops distracting, and stop there. A little grain is not a fault, and sharpening the result is a job for its own page.

For a stubborn shot: brighten only the subject

Both kites came back on the shadows slider alone, with no need to mask anything. Most dark photos are like that. Now and then one is more stubborn: the subject sits in deep shadow while the background is already well lit, and lifting the shadows globally starts to wreck the background.

That is when you brighten only the part that needs it. The curves tool, or a brush or mask in your editing software, lets you lift one area and leave the rest alone. It takes a little longer, and it is the difference between a photo you keep and one you do not.

You can do all of this on your phone

You do not need a computer or paid software to brighten a dark photo. The editor built into your phone does most of these steps already.

On an iPhone, open the photo, tap Edit, and you will find Exposure, Brightness, Shadows, Highlights and Contrast, the same tools in the same order as above. On an Android phone, the Google Photos editor has the same set. If you want a little more control for free, Snapseed has a Selective tool that brightens only the part you brush over.

Work the same order on the phone as on a computer: exposure up first, then shadows, then pull the highlights back. Your phone has less room to push than a RAW file, so go gently and stop sooner.

What to remember

A dark photo is rarely a lost photo. Lift the exposure, recover the shadows, pull the highlights back, add a touch of contrast, and calm the noise. Five small moves, in that order, and most underexposed wildlife shots come back to life.

The two kites needed different moves from the same five. One came back on exposure, the other on shadows. The more rescues you do, the faster you will see, at a glance, which move a dark photo is asking for.

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