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July 23, 2025

Illuminate Your Photos: 5 Pro Tips for Enhancing Lighting with Relight

Professional shoots and costly gear once defined high-quality photography. But now, with social media and smartphone cameras always in our hands, we’re all striving to capture that perfect shot.

With Microsoft’s new Relight feature, spending hours fixing lighting shades with expensive equipment and photo-editing software is over. Relight lets you take control of lighting like never before, opening even more creative possibilities – without subscription fees.

Relight is an exclusive Copilot+ PCs feature in Microsoft Photos that uses AI technology to introduce artificial light sources into your photograph, allowing you to simulate different lighting conditions. Relight lets you adjust how lighting appears in your photo by changing its direction, color, position, and intensity to explore different moods and styles.

A screenshot showing the Relight feature and its editing functionality

5 Pro Tips for Enhancing Lighting on your Copilot+ PC with Relight

Tip 1: Position up to three virtual light sources, experiment with individual colors for each, and play with focus points to perfect your lighting setup.

Tip 2: Fine-tune both brightness and intensity until you achieve the desired look for your photos or highlight specific details.

Tip 3: Try out the built-in presets or commonly used lighting setups, to see how instant edits can transform your images with one click.

Tip 4: Change the position of individual lights to direct attention and shift the focal point within your composition for maximum emphasis.

Tip 5: Control the overall softness and color balance of your image to gently reduce any overpowering intensity.

Why Relight Changes the Game

Traditional photo editors, even powerful ones like Photoshop, require significant expertise — and often third-party plugins — to approximate this control. Windows Photos’ integration democratizes relighting, making it possible for anyone with a Copilot+ PC to create studio-quality edits in seconds. The on-device AI ensures these advanced calculations happen almost instantly, free from the lag or privacy concerns of cloud-based alternatives. 

Getting started

To use Relight in Photos:

Open the Photos app and select the image you want to relight. 
Select Edit then select Relight from the available options.
Choose one of the lighting presets, and optionally customize each light's location, brightness, softness or color, and the overall intensity of the effect.

Requirements

Relight in Photos is exclusive to Copilot+ PCs and currently supports only images.

Relight equips professionals and creators alike to easily adjust visual content to achieve the desired look, regardless of the source or environment of the original photo.

DISCLAIMER: Features and functionality subject to change. Articles are written specifically for the United States market; features, functionality, and availability may vary by region.
[1] Relight in Photos is exclusive to Copilot+ PCs and currently supports only images.