Underexposed images to fix. Best ways

[Marcus Martell]

Hola guys,
i know hat this is a really "easy question" for you but i wanted to know what are your best suggestions to correct underexposed images. Which video fx do you utilize?
thx a lot

[David Jimerson]

Color curves, levels, brightness/contrast. Color corrector (offset, gamma, etc.) Lots of different ways to go. I like color curves the best, because I'm a visual person and I respond well to graphs.

If it's badly underexposed, you're probably going to want to use Neat Video for noise reduction. It's pretty darn good. (But not miraculous.)

[Mike Kujbida]

Like David, I prefer Color Curves but here's a technique I grabbed from the Sony Vegas forum recently and I can tell you that it works great!!


Import the image to the project, drop it into the timeline, adjust your project settings however you'd like but set the Pixel Format to 32-bit floating point (video levels)

Now, right-click on the track header and select Duplicate Track. Do this several times, if you like, to make 4 or 5 duplicate tracks, Mute most of them so that just the bottom two are active. You can toss out what you don't use later on.

Now, you've got a stack of tracks. The bottom will be your master and all those above it are adjustment layers. Go to the track immediately above the master and set it's Compositing Mode to Screen.

Screen mode will lighten the image based on how light the adjustment layer is. Bright areas of the adjustment layer will brighten the underlying areas in the master. Dark areas in the adjustment layer wont brighten underlying layers much.

Save your project. (I crashed Vegas a bit after this)

This single screen layer won't brighten the master enough so unmute another layer and set it to Screen mode too. This might give you too much brightening effect but you can dial it down by adjusting the transparency of this adjustment layer.

If you'd like to add some contrast back to the mix set your top layer or Overlay mode and unmute it. adjust the layer's transparency to give you what you want. I dialed mine down to 4%.

I think this gets the image back into the ballpark. You might play with noise reduction. You definitely should play with turning 32-bit mode on and off to see the difference that makes-it's substantial. Also, just as a nicety, try grouping all the adjustment layers into track group.

[Ian Stark]

Mike, that's a brilliant tip. Thanks for sharing it.

[Marcus Martell]

Mike u r always the Mike Jordan of this forum....
thx

[Rob Wood]

yeh, the duplicate-Screen-control-with-Overlay trick is nice... reminds me of Photoshop/After Effects tweaks.

good one! thx for posting.

[Richard Jones]

You may want to know that Frederic Baumann who produced the brilliant White Balance Plug In has now launched another one which deals with Under Exposed images. It really is very good and very straightforward to use.

His web page (which has a couple of demonstratiuons) is at:-

FBmn Software - plugins for Sony Vegas Pro 10

Richard