@Jack S

The Shade-Tree Color Grader responds:

"Sometimes, there are no bits to move around."

[Edit:]

This was the curve I was using to get the band to look reasonable and to overcome the illumination of a window wall open to the afternoon summer sun.

Thanks guys. Unfortunately, with my camera (in my signature), I don't think there's much I can do about these kind of conditions when I'm shooting. I'll have a play with the colour curve and see if I can get an acceptable result. It's not crucial, it's part of a project for me.

Another approach is to ignore the burnt out areas and use the waveform scope to adjust lift and gain of the areas of importance. Then use the secondary color corrector fx to select the color of the burnt out area and mask it out. Chroma Key fx can be used instead if the burn-out is one pure color, like your sky which is white. Secondary Color may be better if you have a small range of colors like your bright-yellow area. Then you can put a different image on the tracks below it to shine through the masked out area. Works better if the render quality in project properties is set to Best. You may need to animate the underlying image if there's more than one burnt out area and the camera moved about while shooting the top image. I often do things like that with indoor shots exhibiting windows that let in bright outside light... I just step outside and shoot a still of the scenery with my cellphone for the underlying image. The harder way to do it is to construct a bezier free-form mask... I only do it that way if the color range that needs to be masked also appears in other areas of the shot I want to keep.

For years I've used NewBlueFX's ColorFast 2 (CF2) plugin for issues like this. Before CF2, I used Vegas Pro's Color Corrector (Secondary) but found it fiddly in comparison to CF2 because Color Corrector (Secondary) requires the setting of a mask to define the area of the image to be color corrected. CF2 is so much easier. While it does have masking, that is only required if wanted. The Primary Correction controls in CF2 can be used if so desired for color correction of the whole image, then separate controls for the Secondary Correction of Highs, Mids and Shadows can be used. In the following image, I've done a bit of color correction on the whole image (increase sat and lower gamma), but the sky is blown out a bit. Reducing the Highlights level in Secondary reduces the 'glare' from the sky as well as from the stonework at the base of the structure on the left of the image (arrowed).

In some but not all cases, reducing the Highlights level in CF2 to address blown out sky can lower the glare of clouds enough to reveal bits of blue sky - but obviously not in the above example.

Once an area of the image has gone all white, or all of any color really, there's no getting any detail back from it. All you can do is change the color of that white or whatever color it is. Ditto for black.

For sky, if time is not a problem for you:

Export the overexposed parts to single images, create an "action" in Photoshop (replacing sky e.g.) and "automate" that procdure

I know that this might seem kind of irrelevant, but, when filming, the common practice I have heard and try to do with either my video camera or iPhone is film with a low enough exposure (especially when filming indoors and you have a window’s curtains open with outside light coming in) that you can see well enough outside with it a little darker inside than you might want. Then, in Vegas Pro, you can adjust exposer and shadows (especially with a lower ISO/gain) and gain some of the detail back. The end result often looks well balanced and quite good.

(I would like to also mention that most cameras and phones these days, even without filming in HDR, have a pretty decent filming of brighter and darker areas or better contrast, as you may or may not call it)

Export the overexposed parts to single images, create an "action" in Photoshop (replacing sky e.g.) and "automate" that procdure

You are able to do that without creating intraframe flicker, especially around the mask edges?

@Musicvid No, Grandmaster; only for very short sequences (seconds) the eye can be tricked with that; using a still image of the video, making some Photoshop tuning combined with Ken-Burns-effect is an other way to improve the failed part of a video (artificial).

Overall: If the source material is poor, then nothing better will come out of the end product.

;?) I tried something similar a while back, and the results were horrid -- kind of like a primitive rotoscope. But Photoshop actions can be quite exciting for some image sequence work, like this clipping demo.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/zebras-in-post--116165/#ca728987

Just tried it my way and it almost works. If you don't look too closely.

Nothing but Vegas with the posted photo on top with a pair of Color Corrector (Secondary) fxs. And 2 clips off the hub underneath. The opposite of my usual approach. Who knew it would take an hour and a half to render?

@Howard-Vigorita Very clever. As it's a home movie, I'm not sure I want to spend that amount of time. Nontheless, it's a good exercise in what can be achieved.
How on earth did you achieve such complex masking?

Not complex at all. It's a basic feature of the secondary color corrector. Just use the dropper on a frame to pick out colors, check the box to see just the mask, and tweak it a bit to get more or less. On video, it'll track and mask the colors, no automation needed. I usually use it to juice select colors but the alpha slider turns it into a fall-though mask. The sky mask could use some tweaking. Renders and plays better with video on top and stills underneath. Zipped it up if you want to play with it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QMO2jL7bDY35QWC4SHe7nLi_mA_zfETS/view?usp=share_link

@Musicvid  @frmax  I used photo mirage a few times to replace a sky with a picture , it animates the picture ,and if it is a short clip you can get away with it. I also used it for other animations

Interesting. And what an obnoxious soundtrack.