Recover bright rooms from dark property photos.

What a file has to contain before it can be saved

Exposure correction is recovery, not generation. A shadow that still holds a faint signal can be lifted into a legible wall; a shadow that recorded pure black holds nothing to lift, and pushing it produces coloured noise rather than detail. The same applies at the other end: a highlight that clipped to pure white on all three colour channels has no information left, so a blown window stays blown no matter how the correction is described.

This is the most useful thing to understand before deciding whether a photo is worth processing or worth reshooting. Open the original and look at the darkest area you care about. If you can make out any structure at all, exposure work will help. If it is featureless black, the reshoot is cheaper than the disappointment.

Why global brightness makes rooms look worse

The instinct with a dark interior is to raise brightness until the room looks right. That lifts everything equally, so by the time the far corner is visible the window has gone white, the lampshade has lost its shape, and the whole image has the flat, milky quality that reads immediately as an over-edited listing photo.

Local correction treats the dark zone and the bright zone separately, which is closer to what the eye actually does when it moves around a room. The result should look like a well-exposed photograph rather than a rescued one, and the test is whether a viewer notices the light at all. Good exposure work is invisible.

• Check the darkest corner in the original before deciding to process
• Shoot with the largest light source behind or beside the camera
• Turn off ceiling lights where daylight is doing most of the work
• Avoid the phone's built-in HDR for rooms you intend to correct later