How to change the lighting in a photo

Lighting is the part of a picture that is hardest to fix with a prompt and easiest to fix with a control. The lightbox relight tool gives you an actual light: a position you orbit around the subject, a hardness, a brightness and a colour. It builds the instruction from those controls and re-renders the picture under the new light for ✦2.5. This is the tool to reach for when the composition is right and the light is wrong.

A light you move, not a sentence you write

Open a finished image and switch to the Relight tab. What you get is an orbit pad with your picture at the centre and a light marker you can drag: horizontally to circle the subject, vertically to raise or lower it. The marker grows and floats over the picture when the light is in front and shrinks and passes behind when it is behind, so the control reads as a position in space rather than as two numbers.

It opens on an upper front-left key light, which is the classic portrait setup and a reasonable default for most subjects. Six quick-select buttons — top, front, right, left, back, bottom — jump the light to a standard position, and the pad is there for everything between them.

The relight controls

Control	Range	What it changes
Orbit pad	Full circle, raised or lowered	Where the key light sits relative to the subject
Quick select	Top, front, right, left, back, bottom	Jumps the light to a standard position
Softness	Soft or hard	Shadow edge — diffused window light against direct sun
Brightness	0 to 100%	Key light intensity
Colour	Any colour	Warm tungsten, cool moonlight, a coloured practical

Underneath the controls the panel shows the sentence it is about to send, assembled from your settings. That preview is worth reading before you press: it is the honest description of what the model is being asked for, and if it does not say what you meant, moving a control is faster than arguing with it.

Which plan: Relight is a hosted call billed in ✦ gold at ✦2.5 a run, like every lightbox tool. There is no plan gate in the code, but green credits cannot pay for it and a new account is granted no gold — so it needs a paid plan or a credit bundle. The price is held at submit and refunded if the run fails.

Relighting a picture

1. Open the image and switch to Relight. Click a finished picture in the feed, an album or your assets library, then pick the Relight tab in the lightbox.
2. Start from a quick direction. Pick the nearest of the six presets — front for a flat, even look, side for shape, back for a rim. Then refine on the pad rather than starting from an arbitrary position.
3. Set softness before brightness. Hard against soft changes the picture far more than intensity does. Get the shadow edge right, then adjust how strong the light is.
4. Add colour only if you mean it. White is the neutral choice. A colour cast reads as a deliberate scene — tungsten interior, blue night exterior — and reads as a mistake when it is half-applied.
5. Read the preview line, then run. ✦2.5 is held at submit. The result comes back as its own image with a before-and-after slider against the original, which is the fastest way to judge a lighting change.

Make something worth relighting — Deliberately flat light to start from. Generate it, then open the result and use the Relight tab.

What each direction actually does

The six quick positions are not six styles. They are six answers to one question: where does the shadow fall. Reading them that way makes the pad much easier to use, because you choose the shadow and the light comes with it.

• Front — shadows fall behind the subject and mostly disappear. Flat, forgiving and the least interesting. Right for catalogue work where the object matters and the mood does not.
• Side — the shape maker. One half lit, one half in shadow, and every surface texture in the picture becomes visible along the line between them.
• Top — daylight from above. Natural for exteriors and unkind to faces, because the eye sockets go dark first.
• Bottom — light from below reads as unnatural to almost everyone, which is why it is a horror convention. Useful precisely when that is the point.
• Back — a rim of light around the edge with the front in shadow. Separates a subject from its background better than anything else, and takes the detail out of a face doing it.

Brightness and colour are the two controls to move last. A key light in the right place at the wrong intensity is a small fix; a key light in the wrong place at a perfect intensity is still the wrong picture.

What relighting is good and bad at

• Good: rescuing a flat picture. A well-composed shot under even light is exactly what this fixes, because there is nothing to undo — only shape to add.
• Good: matching a set. Six product shots lit six ways become a set when they are all relit from the same direction with the same softness.
• Mixed: hard light onto soft. Adding a hard key to a picture originally lit softly works better than the reverse, because removing a shadow that is already baked in is harder than adding one.
• Bad: fixing exposure. This is not a brightness slider on the file. If the picture is blown out, the detail is gone and no relight recovers it.
• Bad: faces you have approved. Any re-render can shift a likeness. On a character you are keeping consistent, relight before you commit to the face, not after.

Relighting without gold

There is no free version of this exact control, but there is a free way to get a subject under different light: Krea 2 Identity on our own GPU, from ⚡1. Its new-location recipe restages an attached subject into a setting you describe and relights it to match that setting. You do not place a light; you describe a place, and the light comes with it — "at a rainy night market", "in a bright white studio", "under a low winter sun".

That is a different job with a different failure mode. The relight tool keeps your picture and changes its light. The restaging model keeps your subject and builds a new picture around it. If the background is what you care about keeping, the ✦2.5 tool is the one you want.

Can I relight a photo for free?

Not with this tool, which is a hosted call billed in gold. The nearest free route is Krea 2 Identity on our own GPU from ⚡1, which restages an attached subject into a new setting and relights it to match — a new picture rather than a re-lit one.

Does relighting change the composition?

It re-renders the picture, so small things can move. The subject, framing and background survive in almost every case, but this is not a compositing operation and the before-and-after slider is there for a reason.

Can I use it on a photograph I took myself?

Yes, once it is in your assets library. Upload it, open it, and the same lightbox tools apply.

What is the difference between soft and hard?

The edge of the shadow. Soft is a diffused source — an overcast sky, a large window — and flatters faces. Hard is a small direct source, which gives strong shape and strong shadows and suits products and drama.

Is there a cheaper relight option?

The relight panel runs one model at ✦2.5. If the picture only needs to be cleaner or sharper rather than differently lit, the Enhancer tab starts at ✦1 and the Upscale tab at ✦0.5.