Using a photo enhancer for your photographs.

Photo enhancement involves balancing contrast, shadow, temperature and clarity in your snaps. It’s simple with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Explore the capabilities of the best photo enhancer for crafting stunning imagery.

Beautiful comparison of an original photo of flowers to an enhanced photo of flowers.

Don’t shy away from photo enhancing.

Even the best photographers in the world amend and enhance their photographs. With Adobe Photoshop Lightroom at your fingertips, you have the same tools as the professionals to edit, manipulate and optimise your imagery. The opportunities for enhancing images with Lightroom provide endless possibilities for experimenting with new aesthetics.
 

Step-by-step: how to enhance photos.

Photo improvement can boost your picture quality, whether it’s for personal or professional use.
 

Perhaps you’ve captured a rare bird, but the lighting is too dark. Maybe you’ve found an old photo and want to improve it to meet modern standards. It’s all possible with photo enhancing.
 

Here are a few quick and simple ways to easily enhance your photographs:
 

  1. Correct the exposure. Poor lighting affects the tone and visibility of an image. If it’s too dark or too light, it could be hiding important details. You can adjust the exposure with a good photo enhancer which can brighten or darken the whole image, or select key areas.

  2. Blur backgrounds. If the subject of your photo is in the foreground but the backdrop proves distracting, just blur it. This should place all the focus on your subject (whether it’s a person, animal or object). Blurring the background can also make any text you’re applying to an image clearer, too.

  3. Crop the image. Simply removing unwanted areas from the background or cutting down the photograph to achieve the rule of thirds can quickly enhance your image. Cropping lets you adjust the focus and positioning - ideal for portrait photography.

  4. Apply contrast. Add a dramatic touch to your landscapes by increasing the contrast. This enhances the light and dark colours in an image. Be careful though - too much contrast can look unnatural and reduce the detailing and dimensions.

  5. Remove unwanted objects. Sometimes, you won’t be able to crop out certain unwanted blemishes on your image – such as a mark on your camera lens, paper that blew into the shot or a distracting leaf in the foreground. Borrow pixels from other areas in the image to delete and replace in a more natural way.

  6. Add effects. Depending on the purpose of your image, you may want to add text, filters and frames. For example, include your signature to avoid your image being copied without receiving credit if shared online.
     

Two great perks to working in Lightroom.

Lightroom is part of Adobe Creative Cloud. It lets you edit images at your desk or on the go. Use the software to enhance photographs and so much more. Its range of features delivers two key benefits:
 

  1. You can get your original back. As a non-destructive photo enhancer and editor, Lightroom saves your edits separately from the original image. This makes your changes completely reversible, ensuring your enhancing edits are permanent only when you want them to be. Just export your photo as a JPG or PNG file to save those edits and make them permanent.

  2. Quick photo enhancing. The Auto button, powered by AI data from real photographers, is a great place to start enhancing photographs. The Auto feature quickly analyses the content of your photograph and makes adjustments to your image. With a single click, you can instantly fix exposure, colour correct and balance the tones in your photo. At the very least, this auto-enhance feature is a great starting point for adjusting your image. From there, you can tweak white balance, sharpen your image or reduce noise.
Editing the same image in Lightroom on a smartphone and a laptop.

Can you change the resolution of a photo?

You can change the resolution of a photo in Photoshop. Adjusting the size or scale of a photo will automatically change its resolution, as it affects the number of pixels.
 

The more pixels an image has, the clearer it will appear. Cropping a photograph reduces the number of pixels and therefore the resolution quality. However, scaling a high-resolution photo down can help retain clarity at a smaller resolution. 

 

Find the right photo enhancement tools to edit your pictures.

Correct the white balance.

Adjusting your white balance is the process of removing unrealistic colour casts from your images. Correct your white balance in Lightroom, then take the opportunity to experiment with light and colour to create endless variations of your favourite photo. 

 

Add clarity to your photograph.

Bring your dull photos to life by adjusting the Clarity and Dehaze sliders in Lightroom. These intuitive controls let you enhance the sharpness, detail, and texture of your image by increasing the contrast of your midtones. Play with the controls and you may just reveal hidden detail and colour in your images.

 

Sharpen your images.

The Sharpening sliders in Lightroom can help create the illusion of detail by adding contrast to the edges in your photographs. With multiple controls available to tweak and edit your sharpening, you can achieve the specific level of detail you’re looking for without creating a hazy image.

 

Experiment with noise reduction.

Distracting digital noise in your photos is usually caused by low light or a high ISO setting on your camera. Completely removing digital noise is never possible, but you can make it less distracting with a photo enhancer. Quickly reduce this excess visual distortion with controls in Lightroom.

 

Tweak saturation with photo editing.

One way to enhance your photos is by making dull colors pop with the Saturation and Vibrance tools in Lightroom. The Saturation tool adjusts the intensity of all colours in your photo. Alternately, the Vibrance slider can tweak the image’s overall saturation levels while protecting existing skin tone saturation.

 

Enhance your photos anywhere.

Adjust any unwanted colour correction, apply a filter effect, balance light, remove haze, or tweak a portion of your image with selective edits on any device. You can enhance your photos wherever and whenever with the Lightroom mobile app.

 

See photo enhancing in action.

Enhancing a picture of a bowl of soup in Lightroom.

Get a taste for photo enhancing.

Creating appetising food photography is easier said than done. Learn how to create natural tones and colours in your food photos. Soon, your images will look good enough to eat. 

 

Bringing out the reflection of a man in a window with image enhancements.

Enhance mood and atmosphere.

By adjusting colour, perspective, contrast, or highlights and shadows, you can add atmosphere and life to your photographs. Take a look at this process and turn everyday moments into beautiful, timeless images.

Portrait headshot image of a woman next to brown paper package tied up with string.

Edit the perfect portrait.

Do away with blemishes, highlights, and unwanted shadows by using a Brush tool to add photo enhancements into your portraits. With some simple retouching, you can enhance details in your work and edit your way to a beautiful headshot.

 

Whether you stick with auto image enhancements or experiment with enhancing edits on your own, Lightroom has the editing tools to help you create stunning images.

Do more with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
 

Edit photos easily with Lightroom presetsSuper Resolution, easily share photos from any device and access your projects anywhere with cloud photo storage management.

Edit your photos online today.

Fine-tune your photos right from your browser with the Adobe Photoshop Express online editor. Crop, retouch and adjust your photos in just a few clicks. Get unlimited edits with a free account.

 

Try it free

Lightroom vs Photoshop: which is best for you?

Discover the key differences between the apps so you can make the right choice and find the right plan.

You might also be interested in…

Side by side comparison of an unfiltered and filtered version of an image.

Make your own photo filters with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom presets.
Discover how Presets give you all the options and style of photo filters and so much more.

Adjusting perspective of a photo of a surfer below the Golden Gate bridge.

How to crop photos and adjust image perspective in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
Crop images, edit aspect ratio and straighten lines with cropping tools for desktop or mobile.

Woman surrounded by a rainbow of exploding colours.

How to add blur to a photo in Adobe Photoshop.
Add blur to a photo to enhance focus, decrease background noise, add movement or play with colour.

Using the background remover tool to change the background of an image.

How to use the background remover in Adobe Photoshop.
See how to precisely cut out a subject to replace a bland image background with something that pops.

Enhance your photos with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Lightroom (1 TB)
Get Lightroom on desktop and mobile with other Creative Cloud services for just .

£9.98/mo

Lightroom (1 TB)
Get Lightroom on desktop and mobile with other Creative Cloud services for just .

£9.98/mo.

 Creative Cloud photography (20 GB)
Get Lightroom for desktop and mobile, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop on desktop and iPad.
£9.98/mo

|

Creative Cloud photography (20 GB)
Get Lightroom for desktop and mobile, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop on desktop and iPad.
£9.98/mo.

Students and teachers
Save over 65% on 20+ Creative Cloud apps —  includes Lightroom.
£16.24/mo.

Business
Get Lightroom and all the 
Creative Cloud apps plus exclusive business features.

£56.98/mo

Business

Get Lightroom and all the 
Creative Cloud apps plus exclusive business features.

£56.98/mo