Brightness

Overview

The simplest brightness adjustment, making an image lighter or darker in a way that matches visual perception. This beginner-friendly node appears in the new-tab template and has only one parameter, amount. Because it operates in OKLCH, a perceptually uniform color space, the effect remains consistent across hues.

Usage tips

• A practical range is about ±0.05–±0.2. Beyond ±0.5, highlights and shadows approach clipping.
• For brightness variants such as day/night or outdoors/cave, the go-to workflow is to turn amount into a variable and batch-produce the results with batch_render.
• To change contrast as well, affecting shadows and highlights differently, use tone_curve. This node is specifically for adding or subtracting brightness evenly.
• To change the shading colors while preserving detail, gradient_map often gives a cleaner pixel-art result.

Common pitfalls

• Colors became washed out when brightened: increasing L in OKLCH naturally moves colors toward white. To preserve vividness, use oklch_adjust and adjust L and chroma C together.
• Colors shifted in a palette-managed asset: the node rewrites pixel colors, so applying it after quantizing increases the color count. Place palette_quantize after it, or adjust the palette itself with palette_adjust_oklch.

Technical details

Each pixel is converted from RGB to OKLCH, amount is added to L, and the pixel is converted back to RGB. The A channel is unchanged.

This provides a brightness adjustment less dependent on the original hue than the former simple RGB addition. Use RGB Adjust when you want to add to or subtract from the RGB channels directly.

Related nodes

• tone_curve — control shadows and highlights independently
• oklch_adjust — adjust brightness, chroma, and hue together in OKLCH
• hsv_adjust — adjust in HSV terms, including hue shifts
• auto_levels — expand the luminance range automatically