Upload an image to adjust shadows & highlights
Accepted formats: JPG, PNG, WEBP, BMP, GIF (non-animated)
Paste (Ctrl/⌘+V) or drop an image — or import from a URL
Rescue a high-contrast photo without touching the midtones. Image Machine's shadows & highlights tool gives you the two recovery sliders every raw editor relies on: Shadows lifts the darker half of the tonal range to pull detail out of crushed blacks, and Highlights compresses the brighter half to bring back texture in skies, windows and other blown-out areas. Because each control acts only on its own end of the histogram and pins the mid-grey point in place, your overall exposure and colour balance stay intact — you are recovering detail, not flattening the picture. Everything runs locally with exact per-pixel math, so there is no quality loss and your photo never leaves your device.
How It Works
Choose a tool
Pick from 120+ tools to resize, convert, compress, or enhance your image.
Upload & edit
Drag and drop your image and adjust the settings. It stays on your device.
Download
Save your result instantly — no watermark, no sign-up required.
Why Image Machine?
Your files never leave your device
All processing runs locally in your browser. Your images are never uploaded to a server.
Completely free
Every tool is free, with no limits, no watermarks, and no hidden costs.
Lightning fast
No upload waiting — your images are processed instantly on your own device.
Professional quality
Pixel-perfect output with full control over format, size, and quality.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between this and brightness or levels?
Brightness shifts the whole image up or down, and levels remaps the entire tonal range. Shadows & highlights is targeted: the Shadows slider only affects the darker half of the tones and the Highlights slider only the brighter half, while the midtones are held fixed. That lets you open shadows or tame highlights without washing out everything else.
How do I recover a blown-out sky or window?
Drag the Highlights slider up. It darkens only the brightest pixels, compressing them back toward the midtones so detail that was clipped to near-white becomes visible again. The darker parts of the photo are left exactly as they were.
Will lifting shadows add noise or change colours?
The tool brightens shadow detail by scaling each pixel's luminance while keeping its hue, so colours are preserved rather than shifted. As with any shadow lift, very dark regions of a noisy photo can show more grain once brightened, but nothing is posterised and pure black is left untouched.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The adjustment is computed entirely in your browser with the Canvas API — your image is never uploaded, there is no sign-up, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.