How many times have you taken a lovely photo, only to have later looked back and realised actually it’s far darker than you wanted it to be?

Well I’m going to use Pixelmator Photo, this app here, to lighten up this photo I took of Tregenna Castle in Cornwall.

Now, as you can see with the sunset behind the actual castle itself is very, very dark – and you can’t make out much detail.

We can get straight into the nitty-gritty and use a lot of sliders and custom controls, but in Pixelmator Photo I really like to start by using their machine learning Magic Fix.

When you press this little magic wand on the top toolbar the machine learning built into the app will analyse your photo and it will do a pretty good job at making it look far better than the original one that you took,

In fact as you can see, that picture already looks like night and day difference than the one I had earlier.

The castle is lighter, the sky is more orange and saturated, and the whole pictures got almost a dreamy quality to it.

But I want to go in now and fine-tune that result, so I’m going to press the Filters button in the top right hand corner and from here I get a whole array of different options to use.

We want to work on the shadows, so I’m going to find the shadow slider and pull that one right slightly.

Instantly, you’ll be able to see the darker areas are now slightly lighter as it’s pulling out more detail from the shadows and again Pixelmator Photo is using machine learning to make sure it keeps that detail rather than overexposing areas.

I can adjust other settings as well and as you go along you can explore what they do and put them back if you don’t like them.

But, as a general rule, the way the machine learning Magic Fix works (our first step) – if the slider has moved to the right, move it further to the right – and if it’s gone to the left, move it further to the left move it further to the left.

That will more-or-less keep the balance in terms of tone in your picture.

I’m also going to go down and adjust the Clarity, this will make the image a little bit higher contrast and it’ll make it stand out more – particularly the detail on the castle.

Yes, that looks perfect!

I’m going to press the tick in the top corner and then Modify my original picture.

Doing that will automatically save it back into my Photo Library on my iPhone – my newly edited version.

And just to see how different it is, if I zoom in slightly and then press this button on the top toolbar we get a before and after preview of all the edits that we’ve made.

You can see just how much brighter the castle is, how much more detail is there and just generally it’s a much better photo.

Of course there are other videos about Pixelmator Photo on my channel – a couple of which are here now at the end.

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