How to Increase Low Light in Adobe Lightroom

If you’re wondering how to increase low light in Adobe Lightroom, it’s relatively easy with the right knowledge. In this article, I’ll show you how to do so by showing you how to adjust your exposure and adjusting the Tone Curve of your image in Adobe Lightroom. Let’s take a look at these two things first, and then we’ll see how they work together to help us increase low light in Adobe Lightroom.

Before you start

Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom are among some of our favorite pieces of photo editing software. On top of being a powerful image editor, you can even create a business using it—Photoshop is one of many ways you can earn money as a photographer. However, there’s also a downside—Photoshop is only available on Windows and Mac, which means Linux users are out of luck. Thankfully there’s an open source alternative that offers most if not all the same features: Darktable.

Adding contrast back into shadows

If you’re looking to add back contrast into your shadows, one of my favorite ways is using Adobe Lightroom. In order to do that, open up your photo and bring it into Lightroom and adjust it for exposure. Once you’ve done that, you can go ahead and look at your Shadows slider which will allow you to bring back a lot of detail into your shadow areas. And by doing so I was able to recover most of my dark shadow information with only two stops needed in order for me not sacrifice too much contrast from my sky area here. So with just two stops needed I was able to improve my overall image significantly by bringing out more contrast back into those darker areas.

Cleaning up by increasing clarity, vibrance, and saturation

Look at your image. I can almost guarantee you that it will have way too much gray and be lacking any kind of color. The first thing you should do is head over to your Develop module and clean up some things. In general, try boosting clarity, vibrance, and saturation a bit until you see something good. If you're working with RAW files, then make sure that noise reduction is turned off. Noise removal will mess with your photos quite a bit if it's left on while you increase clarity or saturation, so turn it off before doing anything else!

Now we're ready for some more adjustments

Our image is looking great, but it looks a little dull. This is a simple fix: just adjust the Brightness setting. In Lightroom's Basic tab, click on the Brightness button. As you make your adjustments, move from left to right through each of your color channels (Red, Green and Blue). Your changes will have different effects depending on which channel you're working with. For instance, brightness adjustments made to your red channel will affect skin tones differently than brightness adjustments made to your blue channel. So experiment until you find a setting that works best for your particular photo. I used +24 for my Red channel and +5 for my Green and Blue channels. Notice how much more punch our image has!

Putting it all together

Here’s a good example of how you can use more than one search term. Let’s say you wanted to write about how higher-quality cameras can capture images even in low light. You could enter increase low light and lightroom into Google, which would give you all sorts of related searches, from Lightroom 5 tips to Increase low light DSLR camera and so on. This would give you plenty of ideas for how to narrow down your topic even further before writing anything.