How to decrease brightness of only brightest parts of your video

[Jim Arco]

Without seeing your footage or knowing how it was recorded, I would guess that the white blouse is completely overexposed.

You may want to try using shadow-highlights filter. However, it is likely that the camera exposed for the rest of the scene and the the detail in the blouse was so bright that it was beyond the upper range of the imaging sensor and cannot be recovered. That being said, there are some techniques involving multiplying and masking the image that can sometimes recover highlight data. They are complex and time-consuming – might be easier to re-shoot the footage.

Jim
Colorburst Video

[Daniel Waldron]

You could duplicate your footage, use the Extract effect to isolate your hotspot, and then use that layer as a track matte to to target your over-exposed footage. Like others have said though, if it’s too over-exposed there is little you can do.

[Guillaume Jaecques]

Here’s the footage, I’ve made 2 gifs showing them. One’s on the bike, the other is when she’s dancing on the grass. With the grass shot I’d actually like to grass highlights be less bright to, but my problem is I don’t want to give it a greyish tint.

https://giphy.com/gifs/26xBRH4T1DqJeDa3m

https://giphy.com/gifs/l3q2DbgwFAzYwdKPm

If you want I can send you the files to.

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it!

[Jim Arco]

I would tend to agree with Dave. Using the eyedropper tool in the dancing shot, all the values are 255 – there is almost no variation anywhere on the blouse (or the sky.) So there is no detail there at all.

Mostly the same with the aerial shot, but the subject is small enough that you might be able to get it to an acceptable level. Attached is a quick pass at one frame of the aerial shot that I tweaked in Photoshop using shadow/highlights and the raw filter. It still need more work, but you can get an idea of what is possible.

Jim
Colorburst Video

[Grant Van zutphen]

I’ve found the best technique is to create a new adjustment layer above everything else in the comp and apply the Levels effect. This will clip only the highlights. Reduce the Input White value gradually and ensure the Output White value is identical to Input White. Keep reducing those two values until you achieve the desired result.

[John Paterson]

With the source video on layer 1, duplicate the layer twice, then use the upper layer as a luma key to key in only the part of the picture that needs adjustment on layer2 . Then you can use curves or levels to adjust layer 2. Then precomp.