High environmental stability and surprisingly high efficiency of solar cells based on 2D perovskites have renewed interest in these materials. These natural quantum wells consist of planes of metal-halide octahedra, separated by organic spacers.  Remarkably the organic spacers play crucial role in optoelectronic properties of these compounds. The characteristic for ionic crystal coupling of excitonic species to lattice vibration became particularly important in case of soft perovskite lattice. The nontrivial mutual dependencies between lattice dynamics, organic spacers and electronic excitation manifest in a complex absorption and emission spectrum which detailed origin is subject of ongoing controversy. First, I will discuss electronic properties of 2D perovskites with different thicknesses of the octahedral layers and two types of organic spacer.  I will demonstrate that the energy spacing of excitonic features depends on organic spacer but very weakly depends on octahedral layer thickness. This indicates the vibrionic progression scenario which is confirmed by high magnetic fields studies up to 67T. Furtheremore, I will show that in 2D perovskites, the distortion imposed by the organic spacers governs the effective mass of the carriers.  As a result, and unlike in any other semiconductor, the effective mass in 2D perovskites can be easily tailored. Finally I will discuss the exciton fince structure. Optically inactive dark exciton states play an important role in light emission processes in semiconductors because they provide an efficient nonradiative recombination channel. Understanding the exciton fine structure in materials with potential applications in light-emitting devices is therefore critical. Our studies of the exciton fine structure in the family of two-dimensional (2D) perovskites show that in-plane magnetic field mixes the bright and dark exciton states, brightening the otherwise optically inactive dark exciton. The bright-dark splitting increases with increasing exciton binding energy. Hot photoluminescence is observed, indicative of a non-Boltzmann distribution of the bright-dark exciton populations. We attribute this to the phonon bottleneck, which results from the weak exciton–acoustic phonon coupling in soft 2D perovskites. Hot photoluminescence is responsible for the strong emission observed in these materials, despite the substantial bright-dark exciton splitting.