Can I rescue a photo that came out too dark or too bright?

Digital sensors are asymmetrical. They record far more usable information below correct exposure than above it, which is why underexposure is a recoverable mistake and overexposure often is not.

Step by step

1. Diagnose which problem you have.Pull the highlights slider fully down. If detail appears in the bright areas, the file holds information and can be recovered. If those areas just go grey, they were clipped and contain nothing.
2. Work from the original file.Recovery from a RAW file is dramatically better than from a JPEG or from an exported copy, because RAW retains all the sensor readings while a JPEG has already discarded most of the extremes. Always go back to the original.
3. Lift a dark file in the right order.Raise exposure until the mid-tones look right, then pull highlights down if anything has become too bright, then lift shadows only as far as needed. Lifting shadows before exposure produces a flat result.
4. Expect noise, and deal with it last.Brightening amplifies the sensor noise that was always there. Apply noise reduction after the tonal work, and moderately — heavy noise reduction removes fine detail and leaves a waxy surface. Modern machine-learning denoising is much better than the old sliders and is worth using for a difficult rescue.
5. Correct the colour shift.Deep shadows record colour poorly, so a heavily lifted file often turns green, magenta or muddy in the dark areas. Fix it with the tint and temperature controls, or by reducing saturation specifically in the shadows if the editor allows it.
6. Reconstruct clipped highlights only where it is plausible.Some editors have a highlight reconstruction that borrows colour from neighbouring channels. It works when only one or two colour channels clipped — often a slightly blown sky. It does nothing where all three clipped, which is pure white.
7. Consider converting to black and white.A photograph with a badly blown background or a hopeless colour cast frequently works in monochrome, because the eye accepts a white background and the colour problem disappears. It is a legitimate rescue, not a defeat.
8. Crop the unrecoverable part out.Often the simplest answer. A blown window, a burnt-out corner or a blank sky can be cropped away and the picture improves in composition as well.
9. Learn the lesson at the camera.If this happens often, bias your exposure slightly darker and turn on the highlight warning. A file that needs a one-stop lift is cleaner than one that needed a highlight rescue.

Tips

• Recovery latitude is asymmetric: most modern cameras give you three or more stops of usable shadow and less than one of highlight. Expose accordingly.
• Phones bury the original in some cases. If a photograph was taken in a mode that saves both a processed file and a RAW, edit the RAW.
• A rescued photograph rarely stands up to being printed large. Judge it at the size it will actually be used.

Common mistakes

• Pushing the shadow slider to maximum — It produces a grey, noisy, colour-shifted image with no depth. Lift the overall exposure first and use shadows only for the last part of the adjustment.
• Trying to recover a clipped white area — Clipped means the pixels are at maximum with no variation. Any slider applied to them produces flat grey. The only options are cropping, black and white, or accepting it.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask