How to Brighten a Dark Video without Losing Quality: 6 Best Ways in 2024 (Online, iPhone)

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How to Brighten a Dark Video without Losing Quality: 6 Best Ways in 2024 (Online, iPhone)

Last Updated: 2024. 02. 28

Unless you are shooting a Frankenstein movie, a dark or under-exposed video isn’t gonna win you the favor of most viewers.

If you need to brighten a dark video, whether it is due to filming in low-light situations or the wrong settings of your camera or iPhone, we’ve got you covered!

In this post, we will walk you through how to brighten a video without losing quality in the 6 best ways, both online and on your iPhone. So, you can make a dark video brighter and clearer to enhance the overall viewing experience for viewers.

Brighten a dark video for more details and a better viewing experience.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

How to Brighten a Video Online

FlexClip Clideo Kapwing

How to Brighten a Video on iPhone

InShot Videoleap CapCut

How to Brighten a Video Online

To quickly brighten a video on your computer, the easiest way is to upload your clips to an online video editor and use its video brightness or exposure adjustment tool to recover the underexposed video footage.

The benefits are that it’s extremely time-saving as no software or extension is to install and it’s compatible across all platforms.

We’ve tested out 3 user-friendly online video editors that work effectively for brightening a dark video. So, let’s find out how they work one by one.

How to Brighten a Video by FlexClip Online

FlexClip is a user-friendly and feature-packed online AI video editor that allows you to adjust video brightness online for free with ease, including video contrast, exposure, temperature, highlights and shadows, vignette, etc.

Effortlessly brighten a video by FlexClip online.

Brighten a Video Now

Pros:

Offer you an intuitive timeline to seamlessly brighten a video without losing quality by adjusting video parameters, such as exposure, contrast, brightness, highlights, shadows, saturations, etc.

Select from 5,000+ expertly crafted and fully customizable video templates, covering YouTube/TikTok/IG Reels, business promos & sales, birthday/wedding/memorial slideshows, webinars, travel, movie trailers, sports & fitness, beauty & makeup, motivational reels, etc. With easy drags and drops of your video assets, you can create a compelling video in minutes.

Preview

Epic Motivational Sports Video Intro

Use This Template

Preview

Mens Fashion Clothes Promo Video

Use This Template

Preview

Fast Cut Travel Video Intro

Use This Template

Preview

Romantic Wedding Slideshow Video

Use This Template

Choose from 400+ creative effects overlays, such as light leaks, dreamy bokeh, film burns & film grains, fire, golden particles, snow, etc. to add an extra cinematic touch to your brightened videos.

Use creative effects overlays to add cinematic lighting to brightened videos.

Use Effects Overlay

Provide you with 4M+ high-quality stock photo, audio, and video assets, including 74,000+ royalty-free music tracks and sound effects to bring your video to life and 1,000+ editable text animations, GIPHY stickers, etc.

Make full use of vast photo, audio, and video assets for your video projects.

Besides, as a full-featured AI video maker, FlexClip also empowers you with a wide array of helpful AI tools. From the AI video script generator, fueled by ChatGPT, to the versatile text-to-speech generator, AI auto subtitle generator, text-to-image generator, AI image background remover, AI blog to video converter, and audio extractor, etc. you can streamline the video editing process and create viral videos in a breeze.

Seamlessly convert text to realistic AI voices for your videos.

Use Free TTS

Cons:

Watermarks will be added to videos for free users.

Step 1

Access FlexClip > upload your video assets from your computer, phone, Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, or Google Photos.

Upload your dark videos to FlexClip.

Step 2

Brighten a Dark Video

Click the Plus sign to add the dark video to the intuitive timeline > you can trim or split the video when needed.

Add the dark video to the intuitive timeline.

With the video selected, click the “Adjustment” tool > slowly drag the slider of the “Exposure”, “Brightness” and “Shadows” to the right till you find the video looks brighter and cleaner enough. Meanwhile, you need to decrease the parameters of Highlights and Saturation to restore the details of highlights and make the color tone of the video look more natural. Or tweak the Contrast and Temperature to see what works best for you.

Brighten a dark video by adjusting its exposure, highlights saturation, etc.

Brighten a Video Now

Step 3

Add cinematic bokeh lighting to elevate the brightened video. (optional)

Click the Effects tab > select Bokeh or other effects overlay like light leaks, lens flares, etc that fit your footage > drag the overlay slider to set its duration. Done.

use cinematic bokeh lighting to elevate the brightened video.

Use Effects Overlay

Step 4

Preview and share.

Done with the editings. You can click the Export button to save the brightened video in 1080P MP4 video to your computer or directly share it to YouTube, Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, or even TikTok; a clickable link is also available for your blog posts, newsletters, or other repurposings. You can save the video project in MP3 for free for your podcasts. Pretty helpful!

Easily share and repurpose video content.

Brighten a Dark Video Now

Use Free Video Templates

Bonus Tips: How to brighten a video without losing quality?

To brighten a video without losing quality, don’t simply bump up the brightness or exposure because as you increase the brightness of a video, the video’s contrast and saturation and the details of the highlights of the video will go the opposite way. As a result, you will end up with a grey and wash-out video.

The correct way to make a dark video brighter is by balancing the video's brightness and its darkness. So, as you brighten the video, you also need to lower the contrast and highlights or even adjust the saturation to avoid overexposure and wash-out effects.

Besides, please do record your footage in log mode. So, you can keep the maximum dynamic range of the original footage as you brighten a video or color-grade the footage without losing video quality and details.

How to Brighten a Video by Clideo Online

Clideo is another all-in-one online video editor. Its video brightness tool is 100% safe and secure. With a clean and simple interface, additional features, and all compatibility, it is fully capable of brightening a video on a computer without any trouble. You can upload a video from Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android Clideo or add it from Google Drive or Dropbox. It allows you to upload 500MB for free.

Use Clideo to make a dark video brighter

Pros:

Edit brightness, contrast, saturation, vignette, etc.

Easy to use and fast editing

Compatible with all video formats

Cons:

Can’t adjust highlight and shadow of a video

There is a watermark on an edited video for free users

Step 1

Upload your video from a computer or Google Drive.

Step 2

Then you can adjust the brightness, saturation, contrast, and other settings with the help of sliders.

Step 3

Playback your video clip to make sure you like the result. Then click the Download button to download it to a computer or save it back to Google Drive or Dropbox.

How to Brighten a Video by Kapwing

When it comes to brightening a video on a computer, Kapwing is another alternative. With this online video brighter as well as video editor, you can easily change the brightness, contrast, saturation of your video without having to ever leave the browser. Just upload a video from your computer or copy the URL of your video here and start brightening a video on the computer.

Brighten a dark video by Kapwing

Pros:

Easily adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation of a video

Video blur feature

Mulitple ways for video sharing: a sharable link or embed code, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

No watermark for video adjustment

Awful lots of video tools

Cons:

Can’t adjust the highlight and shadow and hue, vignette of a video

How to Brighten A Video on iPhone

If you just recorded a video using your iPhone, yet only to find the video was too dark. No worries, my friend! We'd like to recommend some apps to help you easily brighten a video on your iPhone. You can try one or two of them to brighten your video on your iPhone and make your videos more attractive. Check 5 best screen recorders for iPhone.

InShot (IOS, Android)

InShot is one of the most popular video editing tools on iPhone and Android, and it can help you brighten a video on iPhone instantly. It is well-received by both novices and professionals video makers for its versatile features. You can try to get it from App Store and brighten a video on iPhone.

Use InShot to brighten a dark video

To brighten a video by Inshot, just upload clips to Inshot > head to “Filter” tab > Adjust > move “Lightness” slider to brighten the video. Done.

Videoleap (IOS, Android)

Videoleap is an awesome video editing tool on iPhone and Android, which can help you brighten a video within clicks. Also, it's equipped with tons of amazing features to edit your videos, and it's able to pixelate or censor specific areas of your video. Just give it a try and brighten a video on iPhone.

Use Videoleap to brighten a video

To make a dark video brighter, you just need to upload clips to Videoleap and use the “Adjust” tool to increase the exposure by dragging the slider to the right.

CapCut (IOS, Android)

Last, but certainly not least, another free and versatile mobile app to brighten a video is CapCut, a growingly popular and powerful app application developed for content creators. You can import your dark video > click the Adjust tool > Brightness > drag the slider to the right to easily brighten a dark video.

How to brighten a video on iPhone using CapCut.

Then, fine-tune the Highlights to pull back the details or brighten the shadow to the video and adjust the overall video exposure or even blur or sharpen the video when needed. Plus, there's a whole array of features waiting for you to explore, from video filters and auto-captions to freeze frames and more!

The only downside with CapCut is that since it is designed to create bite-size video content, the maximum video export length is no more than 15 minutes. So, it only works for creating short videos like TikTok or IG Reels.

Now, It's Your Move

So, with our recommended video brightness video editors and apps, you can easily brighten a video and restore its beauty as you saw for the viewers. Ready to give them a go? Just start with FlexClip to brighten a video without losing quality now. Anyway, if you find this post helpful, don’t forget to share it with your friends on Facebook and X (Twitter), etc. Cheers!

Brighten a Video Now

Use Free Video Templates

Frank /

Passionate about photography, video-making and travel, Frank is a seasoned copywriter and a beloved father of 2-year-old daughter at FlexClip. He is always keen to share his latest discovery about video marketing and tricks to relive your memories through videos and images.