Three Ways to Brighten Images in Lightroom: Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness

It happens to the best of us. You snap a bunch of pictures, you take them home and put them on your computer, and you notice that they’re all a tad… dark. Doh!

Now many people would just upload them to Facebook or Flickr anyway. That’s just the way it is… right? Nope! This is one of the simplest, but probably the most important, “retouching” that you can do with image processing software like Adobe Lightroom. There are six settings that you can adjust which together Lightroom calls “Basic Tone,” and three of these (Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness) all go about brightening an image in slightly different ways.

When I first started using Lightroom, I didn’t know the difference to be honest. Nor did I take the time to figure it out. I should have, though. Sure, each setting will brighten an image; but each will do it differently, and each will be better in a different situation. And, unless you just need a minor adjustment, you might get the best results out of combining all three.

So, to help you better understand how these Lightroom tools work, I’m going to use a single image (the shot above of some of the guys from William Paterson’s 2010 Fashion Show) and look at the different effects. If you’d like to play along, here’s the original image as a DNG file. I’m going to post this tutorial one step at a time throughout the week, and I’ll update this post with links to each of the individual pieces.

Three Ways to Brighten an Image in Lightroom

• Lightroom Brightening Tool #1: The Exposure Slider
• Lightroom Brightening Tool #2: “Adding” Fill Light
• Lightroom Brightening Tool #3: Adjusting Brightness
• Combining the Lightroom Brightening Tools: A (Semi)Final Image

Note: This tutorial assumes you’re working with RAW images. The DNG file provided is a standardized RAW format developed by Adobe. You can take pretty much any proprietary RAW format (like Canon’s .CR2 images) and convert them to DNG with software like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. These brightening tools will work different with jpeg images, and your mileage may vary.