PHOTO NOTES
Improve light and colour without over-editing a photo
A practical order for brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpening.
Begin with a useful original
A well-exposed original gives you more room to adjust. This tool applies conventional pixel adjustments; it does not generate replacement details, repair severe motion blur or restore clipped highlights. Keep the source and make a new export.
Set brightness and contrast together
Open Photo Enhance and start with Natural. Increase brightness for a dark image, then adjust contrast gently. Too much contrast can bury shadow detail or wash out highlights. Bright is a starting preset, not an automatic scene analysis.
Treat saturation cautiously
Saturation controls colour intensity. Reducing it to zero creates a monochrome result. Strong increases can make skin and skies look artificial, especially after compression. Compare Original and Result after processing; the preview is a guide to the final image rather than a colour-calibrated proof.
Add sharpening last
Try a small sharpening amount and inspect hard edges. Crisp combines stronger contrast and sharpening, which may produce halos or emphasise noise. Sharpening cannot recover detail missing from the original. Use less for portraits than for a small text-heavy screenshot.
Batch only comparable photos
A batch receives identical settings. Different lighting conditions may need separate runs. JPG and WebP use the quality control; PNG preserves transparency and avoids another lossy encode. Original colour profiles and metadata are not retained, so keep originals for archival or professional colour work.