Upping low exposure

[Nick Meyers]

“a good way to make this image… look more like this image”

short answer: no. 🙁

you may be able to get SOMETHING out of the underexposed stuff,
but it wont look great, and it really wont look like the A-Camera.

i’ve been lifting some outrageously underexposed stuff recently.

i use a few tools for this:
the free Lyric “Shadow Highlight” plugin is good.
i use the Free To Much To Soon “Diffusion” plug in.
i don’t actually add any diffusion, 9I have that set to zero)
but i like the plug in as it gives you a simple way to feed the clip back into itself via a composite mode.
using Add mode really lifts the exposure.
there is also a control to affect the Shadows, Highlights, or everything.

sometimes you have to use both of these, and sometimes more than one instance.
this does freaky things to the colour,
adding a 3way CC after each instance helps to control.

it also adds a lot of noise,
so my final tool is the Neat Video noise reducing plug-in.

i had a quick go at something here: (this is PRE-noise reduction)

in this image, i also used the free Marcus Herick “Facelight” plug in, to punch some extra light into just the face area.
and used the ‘limit colour” effect in a 1way Color Corrector to tone down the outside, which had gone neon green

you can see blotchy colours in the face, too, unfortunately.

here it is with some NR:

as you can see, it’s hard to get something good out of those shadows.

if you want i can email you a project file so you can see what i did, and tweak it.
i’ll send you the version without NR, as thats not a free filter.

cheers,
nick