Brightness Adjuster

Moderate brightness adjustments have minimal impact on quality. Extreme adjustments can cause clipping (pure white or pure black areas losing detail).

Re-upload your original image to start fresh. We recommend always keeping an unedited copy of your original before making adjustments.

In practice they are equivalent for digital editing. 'Exposure' is a photography term for light captured in-camera; 'brightness' in post-processing applies a linear multiplier to all pixel values. Increasing brightness by a fixed multiplier in PixlTools produces the same result as pulling the exposure slider in Lightroom or Camera Raw.

Adjust brightness first to establish the correct exposure baseline, then apply contrast, saturation, and sharpening in that order. Brightness changes affect how all subsequent adjustments look, so setting it correctly first produces the most predictable results.

For mild to moderate underexposure, yes — brightening the image pulls detail out of shadows effectively. For severely underexposed images, significant brightening reveals digital noise (graininess) in the previously dark areas. In those cases, a dedicated noise-reduction pass after brightening is recommended.

You can adjust brightness on JPG, PNG, and WebP images. For PNG files with transparency, the adjustment is applied to the visible (non-transparent) pixels only.