Here's the best way to quickly add light to dark pictures

Rafi Letzter/Tech Insider

The most important part of a great photo is a great exposure.

When your sensor absorbs the right amount of light, everything gets better: the color, the contrast, and especially the noise — that grainy, blurring effect you see on photos shot in dark rooms.

But what can you do when you under-expose an image, and it turns out too dark?

Snapseed, Photoshop Express, and other photo editing apps offer "enhance" buttons, but they tend to produce ugly, grainy fixes. Adobe Photoshop on a computer does a better job with its "Auto" tools, but most of us don't pay that hefty monthly subscription.

The best way to do it for most people is manually — inside your favorite app.

The amount of light you can rescue from your photo depends on your camera's dynamic range (the amount of detail it captures in shadows and highlights) and the quality of your JPEG file. For this tutorial I used a very dark photo from a high dynamic range camera to exaggerate the effect.

This image comes from a PigPen Theatre Co. concert. The band wandered away from the bright lights of the stage and into the dark of the audience and I didn't adjust in time. I'll use the free Photoshop Express app to spruce it up (more on that app's features here), but you should be able to accomplish something similar in whichever app you prefer.

Here's how the original JPEG for this demo looks.

In Photoshop Express, bump up the exposure/brightness slider, but not too far. This is a blunt instrument, and can wreck your image with grain if overused.

Next, push up the highlight slider. This lightens only the brightest and least grainy parts of your shot.