Brighten dark real estate and 360 photos

The window is the brightest thing in most rooms, often many times brighter than the walls. The camera sets one exposure for the whole scene, the bright window pulls it down, and the room around the window falls into shadow. That is why a living room with a big window can look like it was shot at night.

Indoor light is also weaker than it looks to the eye, and it is mixed: blue daylight from the window, yellow light from bulbs and lamps. The camera picks one colour balance for the whole photo, so the walls turn yellow or orange, or the window turns blue.

Auto works on both: it raises the room's exposure while it holds the brightest parts back, and it takes some of the yellow out without making a warm room look cold.

A 360 photo has one more rule: its left and right edges are the same place in the room, and a viewer joins them. A tool that brightens each part of the photo differently can leave a visible line where they meet. This tool applies one adjustment to every pixel, the same at the left edge as at the right, so the seam stays invisible.

Choose the 360 view above the photo to look around before and after. The download keeps the photo's size and its 360 metadata, so it still opens as a 360 photo in a Vistura tour and in 360 viewers that read it.

• Turn on every light: ceiling lights, lamps, under-cabinet lights. A room with all its lights on looks more welcoming, and the camera needs less help.
• Open curtains and blinds, and shoot at the brightest time of day for that room, when the sun is not shining straight into the lens.
• Leave your phone's HDR on if it has the setting (many phones use it automatically): most recent phones combine several quick shots in each photo, which helps keep both the window and the room.
• If your 360 camera has an HDR or bracketing mode, use it, with the camera on a tripod and nobody moving, so the shots line up.
• Use bulbs of one colour in a room where you can: mixed warm and cool bulbs give mixed colours that no single white balance fixes.
• Keep some detail in the window: a part of the photo that is pure white (or pure black) has no detail left to bring back, so a window that is very bright but not pure white can be brought back in part, and one that is pure white stays white.

If you make 360 photos with Vistura Capture, the free 360 camera in your phone's browser, it evens out the brightness and colour between the photos it joins, so the light runs evenly across the panorama. Lights on and curtains open still give the best start, and this tool brightens the result if a room is still dark.