Top 9 Free Apps to Lighten Photos You Should Not Miss

With the cameras on our phones, it's easier than ever to take photos. But often our images turn out darker than we'd like. Thankfully, there are many great free apps that make it simple to lighten up your photos. In this article, we'll highlight the top 8 free apps for brightening photos on both iPhone and Android.

Whether you need to fix an underexposed photo or just give your images more vibrance, these user-friendly apps have you covered. Read on to find the perfect photo editing tools to breathe new life into your pics.

Part 1. 9 Essential Free Apps to Lighten Photos

1. App to Enhance Dark Photos with AI Marvels

HitPaw AI Marvels is an advanced photo enhancer that uses artificial intelligence to light up your images with stunning effects. Its intuitive design and powerful algorithms ensure high-quality enhancements and effortless customization for impressive results.

Its AI-driven technology ensures balanced and natural lighting adjustments, making your photos look professionally edited with minimal effort.

Hightlights of Using AI Marvels to Light up a Photo

AI-Powered Enhancements: Advanced algorithms for automatic photo improvements.
Lighting Adjustment: Fine-tune brightness, contrast, and exposure.
Custom Filters: Apply and customize various artistic filters.
Full Accessibility: Available for Android and iOS.

2. App to Lighten Dark Photos with YouCam Enhance

YouCam Enhance is a great free app for lightening up dark photos. It has an intuitive interface that makes adjusting brightness and contrast a breeze. It is an excellent app if you want to know how to lighten dark photos on iPhone.

The Magic Brush allows you to selectively lighten just the parts of a photo you want, without affecting the rest of the image.

Pros

Simple, easy-to-use interface
Magic Brush for selective adjustments
Range of lighting effects like Fill Light and HDR
Additional editing tools like crop, rotate, vignette

Cons

Limited customization compared to more advanced editors
Contains ads

3. Free App to Lighten Photos with Fotor

Fotor is a free photo editor with a host of features for lighting up underexposed photos. It provides granular control over brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows. Fotor's healing tool lets you remove distractions by cloning over parts of a photo. It is also the best app to lighten dark photos.

Pros

Precise adjustments for exposure, contrast, etc.
Healing/clone tool to remove distractions
Vignette and tilt shift effects
Collage and text tools for composites

Cons

Can feel overwhelming for new users
Collage templates are locked behind paywall

4. Free App to Lighten Photos with VSCO

For both editing and sharing photos, VSCO is a popular free app with filters that can brighten up images. It includes a range of preset filters, with Brilliant being specially designed to lighten underexposed shots. You can also make granular adjustments to brightness, contrast, saturation, and more.

Pros

Brilliant filter brightens dark photos
Flexible adjustment tools
Clean, minimal interface
Built-in camera and social sharing features

Cons

Preset filters can seem limited
Lacks more advanced editing tools

5. App to Lighten Dark Photos with Snapseed

Snapseed from Google is a highly-rated free app for lightening photos while retaining great image quality. Its Selective tool lets you brighten specific areas. The Tune Image filter makes it easy to quickly adjust brightness, contrast, and more. Snapseed also offers fun lighting effects. It is a free app to lighten photos.

Pros

Selective adjustment brush
Simple Tune Image filter
Quality filters and effects
Intuitive UX with automatic optimization

Cons

Struggles with resolution on detailed edits
Can be slow on older devices

6. Free App to Lighten Photos with Photoshop Express

Adobe's free Photoshop Express app provides effective tools for lighting up dark images. It has an Auto Fix function that adjusts brightness and contrast with one tap. The Exposure tool gives you manual slider controls for fine-tuning the lighting. Photoshop Express also includes fun effects and filters.

Pros

Auto Fix for quick enhancement
Precise Exposure adjustments
Quality filters and effects
Syncs with Photoshop ecosystem

Cons

Confusing interface for beginners
Limited selection of free tools

7. App to Lighten Dark Photos with Canva

Canva is a popular graphic design app that also includes handy photo editing capabilities for brightening images. It has filters, vignettes and light leak effects to lend a bright, airy feel. The Enhance tool automatically adjusts lighting, or you can manually tweak contrast, brightness and more.

Pros

Enhance tool for easy optimization
Fun light leak and vignette effects
Additional editing tools like crop and resize
Huge library of design elements

Cons

More limited controls than dedicated editors
Design focus can seem distracting

8. Free App to Lighten Photos with Foodie

Foodie is a photo editor tailored for making food photos pop through brightness and color adjustments. It has an Auto Enhance button that intelligently lightens photos. The selective Color Splash feature lets you highlight specific food shades. And manual sliders allow granular lighting tweaks.

Pros

Auto Enhance optimized for food pics
Color Splash to make flavors pop
Manual adjustment sliders
Fun food filters and stickers

Cons

Specialized for food photography
Limited utility for other photo types

9. Free App to Lighten Photos with Photoleap

Photoleap is a robust free photo editor with advanced AI tools to automatically lighten and enhance images. The intelligent Auto Adjust button scans your photo and makes the ideal lighting tweaks. The brush lets you brighten specific areas. Photoleap also has high-end features like layers and lens flare effects.

Pros

Auto Adjust AI for instant fixes
Targeted brush for local adjustments
Layering and blending modes
Professional lens flare effects

Cons

Auto adjustments can be inconsistent
App lacks organization features

Part 2. The Best PC App to Lighten Dark Photos with HitPaw FotorPea

While the free apps covered so far provide useful tools for lighting up photos if you're looking for truly professional-grade enhancement, premium software like HitPaw FotorPea is the way to go. This AI-powered photo editing software takes image lighting to the next level.

HitPaw FotorPea is an automatic ultra-quality AI photo enhancer for Windows and Mac. It features state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to instantly improve image quality, reduce noise, enlarge photos, and restore old/blurry photos with just one click. It is the best app for lightening dark photos.

Features of HitPaw FotorPea

AI-Powered Automatic Photo Enhancement: It uses advanced AI technology to automatically enhance image quality and resolution with one click.
Reduces Blurriness: The AI models can effectively make blurry pictures crisp and clear.
Removes Noise: It can remove noise from images shot in low light or high ISO.
Lossless Image Upscaling: You can enlarge and upscale images to higher resolutions without any quality loss.
Multiple AI Models: It provides 4 different AI models for general enhancement, denoising, face retouching, and colorizing black & white photos.

With HitPaw, enhancing your underexposed photos to make them brighter easily

Step 1:Download HitPaw FotorPea for your Mac or Windows computer. You can try the software for free before purchasing.
Step 2:Import your original dark photo that needs brightening into HitPaw. It supports files like JPG, PNG, RAW, and more.
Step 3:Select the optimal AI model “Low-Light Model” for lighting enhancement. The General model works great for most real-world shots. For portraits, use the Face model.
Step 4:Hit the "Preview" button and let HitPaw's AI instantly adjust your photo's lighting, colors, details, noise, and more.
Step 5:Preview the enhanced version of your newly brightened photo. Make any last tweaks if needed, then export the final lit-up image to use and share.

Video Tutorial for How to Light up A Picture with One Click

FAQs about Apps to Light up a Photo

Q1. Why are iPhone pictures so dark?

A1. If you don't get the exposure right, your photo will either be too bright or too dark. If the photo is under-exposed, it will lack detail in the shadows. And the highlights may appear dull.

Q2. How do I add light to my iPhone photos?

A2. To add light to your iPhone photos, open the Photos app, tap Edit, adjust brightness using the exposure and brilliance sliders or apply filters, and then save your changes. Or using some AI tools as HitPaw Fotorpea to batch process dark photos.

Final Words

In this article, we covered the top 9 free apps to lighten photos on Windows and Mac platforms.

While all these apps provide ways to lighten photos, they can be complex for beginners. For effortless one-click brightening powered by AI, we recommend HitPaw FotorPea. It automatically enhances image lighting and quality with no learning curve. The AI photo enhancer is easy to use on both Windows and Mac.

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