Adjust Brightness & Contrast
Rescue dark, underexposed footage or tone down overly bright videos. Fine-tune brightness and contrast with precise slider controls and see the effect in real-time before processing.
No account, no login, no credit card — just open and use.
How It Works
Upload your video
Adjust brightness and contrast sliders
Process and download the corrected video
Features
Use Cases
Fix dimly lit indoor recordings
Reduce glare from outdoor footage
Enhance visibility of security camera footage
Additive light, multiplicative depth
The two controls do mathematically different things, and knowing which is which makes correction fast. Brightness is additive: +0.15 adds the same lift to every pixel, shadows and highlights alike — the whole image rises like a stage light coming up. Contrast is multiplicative around the middle: 1.3x pushes bright pixels brighter and dark pixels darker, adding depth without moving the average.
Underexposed footage usually wants both: lift brightness until faces read, then restore contrast because the lift flattened it. Overexposed footage wants negative brightness and a touch of extra contrast to bring back punch. Flat, hazy footage — drone shots, footage through glass — often needs no brightness change at all, just contrast at 1.2–1.4x.
The quiet workhorse of fixing footage
Most 'bad' phone video is not bad — it is two sliders away from fine. Backlit subjects, dim restaurants, screens filmed at night, washed-out window shots: exposure correction is the highest-leverage edit per second spent of anything on this site. The live preview makes it a ten-second job: drag until it looks right, process once.
Correction is also the proper first step of a grading chain. Color presets are tuned for reasonably exposed input, so run this tool before Color Grading when the source is dark or flat — corrected footage takes a grade the way it was designed to land.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do the two sliders actually control?
Brightness shifts every pixel lighter or darker by a fixed amount (an additive offset from -0.5 to +0.5), like opening or closing a lens. Contrast stretches or squeezes the range between dark and light (a multiplier from 0.5x to 2.0x) — more contrast deepens shadows and brightens highlights simultaneously.
Is the preview accurate to the final export?
Yes, deliberately so. The live preview and the final FFmpeg render are driven by the same values on the same scales, so what you see while dragging the sliders is what the encoder writes. No exporting-and-hoping loop.
Can this rescue a very dark video?
It can lift it substantially — a +0.2 to +0.3 brightness push with a modest contrast lift makes evening footage legible. What it cannot do is invent detail the sensor never captured: areas recorded as pure black stay textureless, and strong lifts amplify sensor noise. If noise appears, run Denoise after correcting.
Should I adjust brightness or contrast first?
Brightness first, until the midtones — faces, walls, the subject — sit right. Then add contrast until the image has depth without losing shadow detail. Correcting in that order avoids chasing both sliders in circles.
Does the correction re-encode my video?
Yes — pixel values change in every frame, so the video re-encodes at visually lossless CRF 23. Audio passes through untouched.
Often Used Together
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