Uhh, the one you plug in to the wall BEFORE you start shooting.

Sorry, I had to.

-C

... it's not a perfect world, ya know. :)

i use photoshop shadow/highlight.. photoshop had the best "shadow retrieval" results in my test (versus plugins for vegas)

:( me no PS. gotta use what I gots

You must be thinking of the Sony plugin called guess what? Sony Fill Light. It first appeared after about V10 of Vegas I think (bought from I forget where).

I prefer New Blue Video Essentials 2 "Shadows and Highlights" which is marginally better. If I want a better job then I pass the clip through Adobe After Effects or Premiere Pro (or even Premiere Elements if you have it).

For RAW stills I generally use the controls in Adobe Camera RAW with Photoshop. For best results with stills I use LightMachine from PhotoWiz from The Plugin Site. It identifies shadow regions with controllable feathering and you can control the brightness, colour saturation and contrast in that region. Ditto for highlights as well.

yes, FILL I did mention. It does that, but I ran across another way accidentally. Just did some testing.... it was GAIN in color correction: seemed to act like FILL does, yet better in some ways. Goal: brighten, sharpen shadowed bark.
here's a pic from video, strait into the sun to push range of my Canon T3i.
then the same pic adjusted with GAIN and fill and a bunch of other stuff.

Maybe New Blue's Colorfast? It can select specific color range to brighten or dim.

wwjd? Re: ByronK, I've got NB CF and would happily do a test with it. Where's the original footage/jpg/png?

Cheers

Grazie

What effect are you trying to achieve?

The "before" image already shows more detail in the backlit tree bark than I would expect if I were looking at it in real life. Backlit SHOULD look dark unless the point of interest is in the dark. I found the image looked much better to me with DARKER backlighting, which I achieved by increased contrast, and with brightness adjusted so that the burnout of the highlights was unchanged.

I would lift shadows if the face of the subject is backlit, or the facade of a building is partially or wholly backlit. Backlit dense trees look more interesting if brightened to the point where the edges are green or the trees appear to have depth. If there is nothing of interest in the shadows, leave them dark. Images with no shadows tend to look flat and bland.

[I]"i use photoshop shadow/highlight.. photoshop had the best "shadow retrieval" results in my test (versus plugins for vegas)"[/I]I love this tool for recovering detail on stills. However, I must admit I haven't used Photoshop for video. What's your workflow here? A test just revealed that AVCHD clips import nicely and the Highlights/Shadows works as expected. Do you then render these from Photoshop & Import to Vegas? What render format?

TIA,
...Jerry

my test video frame already had the lows lifted by CINESTYLE profile already... so, not a very good example. Usually pointing into sunlight WOULD darked the trees bigtime.
But standing there as a human with 24+ range of visual stops I can see the blinding sun AND the detail in the bark. So, the attempt is to squish that range into the viewable area while recording it on my crappy 10 stop Canon T3i camera. CINESTYLE usually achieves that, so this example is not the best.
And movies are never "real" looking so I am not worried about looking real, but showing what I want to show as DP and Director.

CC GAIN is what I was remembering I forgot that pulled the lows up