Making Dark Underexposed Photos Visible

In these 3 photos I started out with a photo that had been underexposed and was way too dark. In fact the photos are almost impossible to view.

Then I took a tool called IrfanView which is a freeware product that you can get free off of the internet.

I mainly use IrfanView to crop images, tweek the colors, and to set a clear background color. You can do the same thing with other products like Photo Shop, Gimp (A freeware version of Photo Shop), and a whole slew of other products.

With all three photos I did the same two changes. And the editing probably took less then two minutes to do.

  • First I pulled a slide bar to make all the photos much brighter.
  • Second I pulled on a slide bar to increase the contrast.

In the next 2 rows the dark ugly photo on the left is the same orginal photo.

The photos on the each were edited slightly different to get a much lighter and clearer photo.

Notice the eyes and eyeballs are visible in the editied photos

His glasses are clearly visible in the edited photos while they are not very visible in the orginal photo.

His face is clearly visible in the edited photos and even has some color to it.

His mustusche is clearly visible in the edited photos.

The two negitive things are

  • The background is no longer clear. The editing pretty much destoryed it.
  • In the orginal photo the tip of his nose was exposed much better then the rest of the photo. In the edited photos the tip of his nose almost looks like that reindeers red nose.
 
here i tweeked the photos with GIMP. Changes are same as before.
Comparing GIMP Photos to each other
Edited with GIMP Edited with GIMP
Comparing IrfanView photo to GIMP photo
Edited with IrfanView Edited with GIMP

In this photo the face was very dark but after the editing you can see his mustashe.

Before there was almost a dark area where his neck was. After the editing you can see he is wearing a black t-shirt.

The buttons and other details of the coat were almost all black and not very visable in the first photo but are very clear in the photo that has been edited.

Also after the editing the lanyard connected to the camera and around his neck is clearly visible, where in the first photo only half of the lanyard was visible.

The downside is the tile behind the man was clearly visible in the first photo. But in the edited photo the tile isn't clearly visible!

 

This photo after editing isn't that great. But it is much more easier to view then the orginal dark photo.

This photo was only shot with a 1 megapixel camera. That is why the quality of the image is so low.

The prior photos were shot with a much higher quality image. Probably 2 or 3 megapixels.

 
This photo is too dark!

Tweek #1 raise brightness

This photo is too dark!

Tweek #2 increase the contrast for final fix

Back to the other photos