Thanks Kimberly

I can certainly give that tool a go. Does it have underwater settings then or is there a good preset to use for this type of issue?

I also uploaded a short video

http://1drv.ms/1vtUUc2

Within Vegas Pro, I would start with levels and color curves. The former tool should clear up a lot of the fuzziness -- the haze.

You might also try putting a copy of the video on the track above and experiment with the cookie cutter and opaqueness settings on the upper track. I've used that successfully to tone down blown-out areas of a shot.

Jack

That site says blocked because of security threat.

There is zero detail in the highlights of your clip, so there is nothing there to recover.

As already noted, Color Curves can let you adjust to remove some of the haze.

For clips which have too-bright highlights, but where there is a little detail left, and where the overall clip is over-exposed, the old trick posted here ten years ago was to use an invert fX, followed by levels, followed by another invert fX. You then adjust the gamma control in the levels fX, which now works "backwards," so you move it up to make the image darker.

Your clips is not really overexposed, so color curves is your best bet for reducing the haze.

Like JackW, I'd suggest you could get a long way down the road with the Color Curves while watching the scopes in Vegas Pro.

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40618156/2014-11-01%20Color%20Curves/Color%20Curves%20in%20Vegas.png

The flat tops of the Waveform display is clipping of detail you can't get back but the rest of the shot can look a lot better.

Props to johnmeyer who types (and probably thinks) a lot faster than me.

my best result:

http://i.imgur.com/oV2gVu6.jpg

highlights may be enhanced a bit still.

Here's my experiment. watched scopes and used: White Balance, CC to reduce gain, unsharken mask on medium. Tried an UNBLOOM plugin later but that didn't work like I wished.

https://copy.com/RuUQnmjxMepcT00s

unsharken

Not a bad idea, given the location . . .

My simple shot at it:

In Levels filter, set Input Start .180.
Set Gamma at about 1.05
For most renders, stack the Studio RGB Levels filter last.
Some Unsharp Mask might be interesting, but I didn't try it.
I wouldn't use Sharpen because it will blow more pixels.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20519276/Image1.png

you can do some pretty cools things with blown skies in photoshop by using gradients and just making the sky look blue. Something somewhat similar might be possible in Vegas by keying out the sky.

But really highlights aren't your problem here. Your lens is fogged and that's what everyone's going to notice. Photoshop's clarity slider (in Camera Raw) can help a lot. In vegas, a cruder but still useful tool would be unsharp mask with an unusually big radius. Just dial up the strength, and then slide the radius around until the image starts looking contrasty. Good luck!

Just a little tip for future shooting, if you do not already know about it. GoPro make anti-fogging inserts, which you insert inside the housing. They are simply moisture absorbing chemical on blotting paper, but they are almost essential for use with the GoPro, especially in tropical environments.

HA! I said unSHARKen mask

I quite like unSHARKen Mask. Could be used by Nick and Serena to provide Age Limit Viewing? Maybe an unTRIVIA Mask for boring footage; an unRELATIVE Mask for overly inebriated Wedding attendees... The list is endless!

Grazie

>> For clips which have too-bright highlights, but where there is a little detail left, and where the overall clip is over-exposed, the old trick posted here ten years ago was to use an invert fX, followed by levels, followed by another invert fX. You then adjust the gamma control in the levels fX, which now works "backwards," so you move it up to make the image darker. <<

Not quite 10 years ago John... It was another of malowz' stroke of genius. See here and here. My bookmarks are working overtime at the moment :)

Not quite 10 years ago John... It was another of malowz' stroked of genius. See here and here. My bookmarks are working overtime at the moment :)At my age, things that I think happened a few weeks ago turn out to have happened five years ago, so I automatically add five years to any date that I get from memory.

I agree that malowz' tip was indeed genius. It lets you apply the non-linear gamma curve, but in the other direction, which is just what you want for over-exposed clips.

Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for the pure white, over-blown highlights. Since restoration is my specialty, I've though about creating some sort of fill function. It is trivial to create the masks needed for the fill, but figuring out what to put into those white maksed areas has me stumped. If I had access to colorizing technology (i.e., the software used to colorize B&W films), I could perhaps find similar areas in other parts of the video that were properly exposed, and use those colors and textures to fill the over-exposed areas. However, this would be incredibly labor-intensive, and could only be justified for commercial film of an historic nature.

So, I come back to my earlier statement that there is nothing you can do to improve the original footage.

One option I've suggested in the past is to go the other direction, and instead make it look worse. What? Yes, I have often had good luck by solarizing the result, by intentionally applying a hyper-contrast effect. I illustrated the results of this technique in my post in a thread which is identical to this one (my bookmarks are also working). The OP should read this thread:

Over Exposure

My post, along with the before/after snapshot, is about 1/4 of the way down the page. If you don't have time to read that entire thread, here are the pics from my post:

Someone sent me this grossly overexposed photo (this was a still frame issue, but obviously the same thing applies to video):

Before



There was no hope of rescuing it, so I instead chose to emphasize the problem and thereby create what I hoped was a pleasing effect:

After

"If I had access to colorizing technology (i.e., the software used to colorize B&W films), I could perhaps find similar areas in other parts of the video that were properly exposed, and use those colors and textures to fill the over-exposed areas."

I had thought along similar lines. Sometimes it is only one or two channels that have saturated. When the blue saturates with a blue sky, the sky tends to turn green before white, for instance. If you turned the extreme highlights into a grey scale to retain some sort of graduation in brightness, and then colourise it to a blue sky, you may be able to get something sensible. However, if you had light coloured buildings, vehicles, etc. they may be burnt out more than the sky and may make the exercise worthless.

Another approach with a saturated blue channel in a blue sky is to predict what the blue level should be from the unsaturated green and red levels and substitute (after darkening the sky of course so that the predicted blue level no longer saturates).