Brighten a dark clip with Exposure and Contrast

Dim rooms, evening walks and a phone with the exposure locked low all produce clips that look muddy. You can rescue most of them in the Color tab without leaving DepCut. The histogram tells you how far to go.

Read the histogram first

Select the clip on the timeline and click Color in the right panel. Park the playhead inside the clip so the preview shows it. The graph near the top of the tab shows red, green and blue curves for the frame in the preview. Shadows are on the left and highlights on the right.

A dark clip has its curves bunched against the left side, with little or nothing toward the right. That bunching is what you are trying to spread out.

Lift the clip

1. Drag Exposure to the right. Watch the histogram and the preview together. The curves slide toward the middle as the picture brightens.
2. Stop when the curves fill most of the graph without piling up against the right edge. A pile at the right edge means the brightest parts are washing out.
3. If the picture now looks flat or gray, raise Contrast a little. This pulls the darks back down and brightens the lights, which restores depth.
4. If the shadows are still heavier than you want, nudge Brightness for the last small lift. At the same slider value, Brightness moves the picture by less than Exposure, so it suits fine tuning.
5. If colors look weak after the lift, raise Saturation slightly.

Exposure works in stops of light and has a full range of one stop either way. Most dark clips need only part of that.

Check your work

Play the clip through and check more than one frame. A shot that goes from a lit doorway to a dim hallway needs a setting that suits both, and a slider tuned on one frame can leave the other too bright.

If you lose track of where you started, click the small circular arrow beside a slider to put that one slider back to zero. Reset all clears the clip's whole color grade.

Each drag is a single undo step, so you can try a bold setting and step back if it goes too far.

Know the limits

Lifting a dark clip lifts everything in it, including the grain and noise the camera recorded in the shadows. If the shadows look noisy after a strong lift, bring Exposure down a little and let Contrast do part of the work. A clip that was extremely dark may not recover cleanly, and no slider will add detail that the camera never captured.

Lifting also changes how strong the colors look. After a big move, check skin tones and adjust Temperature or Saturation until they look natural.

Match the neighbors

The grade belongs to the clip you selected. When you brighten one clip, look at the clips on either side of it. If the next shot was filmed in better light, the cut will jump. Lift the dark clip just far enough to sit comfortably beside its neighbors.

Start with one clip

Open DepCut, pick the darkest clip in your edit, and work through Exposure, Contrast and Brightness in that order.