use "Sony Fill Light" in Vegas 11.

in Vegas 10, you'd have to track down the velvetmatter plugins (I don't think they are being sold anymore).

for Shadow only, i use Secondary Color Corrector with Hue/Sat turned off, Luma set 000-000 (or whatever works). for High only change the Luma to 255 and 255.

in either case, turn on the mask, then adjust the Smoothing amount til the area you want is selected.

Call me old fashioned, but since you mentioned Photoshop, the Levels and Gamma adjustments work almost exactly the same way in Vegas as they always have in Photoshop. But with one big advantage -- you can stack filters in Vegas.

Two caveats; Keep your desired highlight and shadow detail within gamut, and don't negate the effects of one filter with another that is stacked. That's sure to affect bit depth.

Since you are coming from Premiere, I wanted to point out two ways to see what you are accustomed to, using Vegas Preview without needing an external monitor.

1) Apply a Studio->Computer RGB filter to the Preview (unless you will be rendering to RGB), do your adjustments and edits, but MAKING SURE to remove it before rendering.
2) Adjust your levels in 0-255 RGB space (the Vegas default), then add the Computer->Studio RGB filter to the output, just before rendering, if you will be using a YUV codec to render.

I know this seems weird, but Vegas preview operates in native RGB space.

I have been hunting for years for something equivalent to Adobe Shadow/Highlights effect. I first met it in Premiere Elements.

The best I have found so far for Vegas is NewBlue Shadow/Highlights in Video Essentials II. It is not as good as the Adobe version, and suffers from lack of local contrast in the raised shadows. It is very similar to Fill Light in Vegas but I found it to be a bit buggy and not quite as good in any case.

These two seem to work by doing a global re-mapping of pixel levels regardless of context, whereas Adobe applies a mask with feathered edge to separate highlights from low lights and therefore permits adjusting the brightness and contrast in the shadows without spoiling the highlights. A potential problem with this method is the creation of halos, so good control of the feathering is essential.

I have a PhotoShop compatible plugin (LightMachine, from The Plugin Site) for my image editor which has even more options than Adobe. I use it all the time for adjusting backlit or shadowed still images. I have considered using it for video by exporting the video as a series of still images and batch processing them, but haven't tried it yet.

I was recently watching a DVD travel documentary where the narrator was standing in a public square in bright sunlight with shadows diagonally crossing the facades of the buildings behind him. The shadows were quite soft with no haloing and good contrast. I would love to know how they did that. I don't think it would have been practicable for them to use a real fill light, so they must have done it in post.

Thanks for all the feedback. I have tried all of the above effects but they all seem to apply to the whole image, whereas I want it to apply only to the highlights. So I still haven't got the effect I want. I will try New blue Video essentials if I can get a trial download. I hope that is better than their Titler which caused many crashes of Vegas Pro so I had to uninstall it.
Thanks again for the help.

Thanks for all the feedback. I have tried all of the above effects but they all seem to apply to the whole image, whereas I want it to apply only to the highlights.Then I don't think you used Color Curves, or perhaps don't understand how to use it. It will do exactly what you are trying to do. I happen to have this dialog handy which shows how I gain the shadows without affecting the highlights:



You just click on the curve to add a point, then drag the point upward or downward to change the gain at that point. You can use the Bezier handles to change the shape of the gain curve. What you want is the reverse of what this curve does, so you would add a point instead at the upper right corner of the line and then move that point upward. To keep the mid tones and shadows from being altered, you add a point at the lower left and in the middle of the curve before you add a point at the upper right and then when you move the upper right point, these other two points "anchor" the curve and keep those sections from being increased or decreased.

PS shadow/highlight functions cannot be reproduced with curves and similar techniques. it is way better.

"unique about this function is that it uses surrounding pixels within
the image to base its corrections upon."

http://www.thedigitaldog.com/files/CSShadowHiglight.pdf

i was using the after effects shadow/highlight plugin inside boris red, and boris red on vegas. so i got shadow/highlight in vegas ;)

also, photoshop can work directly with video files (tru quicktime) so no need to export in image sequence to process video on it.

in my tests (but not too scientific), PS shadow/highlight adjustment its better than sony fill-light or newblue S/H

I agree with you malowz. The Adobe way is superior (but still not as good as LightMachine, for images, in my opinion). You need to use feathered masks to separate highlights from lowlights.

I know Ross is preoccupied with highlights but I am generally preoccupied with shadows, so I will illustrate with a shadow.

Consider a building facade with the sun casting a shadow over part of it. The object is to lift the shadow part to make it comparable to that part in full sun. The part in sun should be unchanged. (In practice you wouldn't lift the shade so much as to make it identical - it should still look as though it were a shadow.) Let the walls be a light brown with window frames dark brown. Let the window frames in sunlight be the same brightness as the walls in the shade. How are you going to lighten the walls in shade and not lighten the window frames in sunlight without using a mask? Furthermore, the walls and frames in the shade should be lightened by the same amount (e.g. two exposure stops) to preserve the contrast. This you can do with properly constructed feathered masks.

"i was using the after effects shadow/highlight plugin inside boris red, and boris red on vegas. so i got shadow/highlight in vegas"

Some time ago I tried using the shadow/highlight effects from Premier Elements and Premiere Pro (forget what versions) inside the trial version of something that I have also forgotten the name of for the moment. Perhaps it was Boris Red. It allowed me to use SOME (but not all) .aex plugins in Vegas, but I couldn't get the shadow/highlights effects to work.

Could you say precisely what versions of each you were using?

Obviously CCs are my first go to tool, just like you.
However I think the plugins these guys are talking about are bit more devious than what can be done with curves, they split the luma range into slices and process each one individually. As noted this can create halos as you introduce negative light at the edges of the cross overs.

What can be done in Vegas is to use multiple tracks with level based masks to do the same kind of thing but it is a lot of work

Also worthy of a mention is that how much detail can be extracted from highlights and shadows is every dependant on the camera that took the image and how it was recorded. That's one reason people spend a lot of money on cameras like the Alexa.

Bob.

i was using boris red 4 with the .aex from after effects cs3 i believe.

just put the .aex and it shows on the menu. when trying to use, will trow a error saying XXX file is missing. just look for the file on after effects directory, and copy to system32. was about 4 files needed to work i believe.

but now im in win7 x64 with vegas x64/red x64, and latest version from after does not work anymore.

Thanks. I guessed that version numbers and of course 32 bit versus 64 bit might be important. I think I got as far as seeing the plugin but it didn't work properly (some controls missing or not responding?).

" they split the luma range into slices and process each one individually."

No, that's not how they work. They split the two-dimentional space into two regions (H/L and L/L) with a feathered crossover between and work on each independently.

Here is what i have tried so far:

I have tried using the curves effect with some success. Thanks johnmeyer for your instruction. The results seem to be somewhat contrasty with some of the cloud details being blown out. I will work on this further to learn more on how to use the curves. If anybody knows a good source please let me know.

I downloaded a trial of FBmn plugin and tried it. It did work but it dulled all the colors, making it just darker and more grey. Warning - I now have a watermark of some description on my project - a small rectangle - not sure if it came from here or where but it has messed my whole project - I did uninstall the plugin, even re-installed Vegas Pro and tried a backup.

I downloaded NewBlue Video essentials. I liked the results on some of my video using the Shadow highlights open FX and the restore highlights preset. Other clips were not so good. I cannot justify $100 for this. If the open FX plugin was available alone for a more reasonable price I would buy it.

Thank you everyone for your comments - work continues.

This is a follow up to my last post.

Of course defining the relevant mask is the hard part, and doing it automatically means that it must be based somehow on relative brightness. Perhaps that is what Bob meant.

In my example above, the shadowed part of the facade is identified by its relative darkness, but small dark objects in full sun must be excluded. So a starting point must be to blur the image so that small objects are ignored. Then the width of the feathering is dependent on the abruptness of the transition from light to dark, so edge detection would be used. For the facade with shadow example, the feathering would be quite narrow, but in a landscape where there might be more gradual transition from dark to light, the feathering would be broader. The feathering width is not fixed but adapted to the scene. If you get the feathering wrong you will end up with halos, but a small amount can be OK unless you go looking for them.

The LightMachine plugin I use for still images has quite a few parameters you can tweak to get the best masks. In some cases multiple applications may be necessary, concentrating on different shadows or highlights one at a time.

Hi,

I am the developer of FBmn Software Exposure. I am not sure to understand correctly what you say in your last post: "I now have a watermark of some description on my project - a small rectangle".

Do you think this might come from the plug-in? Could you please give more details? I really don't see how this could come from my plug-in, and never got such feedback, but never know. Also, if you can send me a screenshot, my email address is in the evaluation email. Never got any bug report since the plug-in is released, but if there is one, I would really like to fix it!

Apart from this, there has been a benchmark comparing various lighting correction methods published here, including various ones discussed in this thread:
http://vegas.babasse.net/?p=1538

Please let me know if there is anything I can do for helping.

Thanks in advance,
Frederic - FBmn Software

Ross,

I recommend trying to get out of the mindset of wanting to match what you can do with photoshop/premier pro in vegas.

Vegas' color/levels tools are so far behind what Adobe offers, you are just setting yourself up for grief. You can convert/move files back and forth between the two apps, but that hardly makes for an efficient workflow.

Settle for good enough, using Vegas' tools, and appreciate the advantages Vegas does offer when it comes to speedy and intuitive editing. I've been waiting since v9 for more modern plugins, but clearly Sony's priorities are elsewhere.

Musicvid's tip about stacking levels plugins is a good one--it's a crude but effective way to balance color channels. I avoid the color curves tool like the plague, preferring to just work with the levels input/output and gamma.

Of all the tools I miss, photoshop's highlight recovery and fill light (in the raw converter) would be at the top of the list (followed closely by a decent white balance!). Maybe someday...

for me, fill light from vegas is enough for a little touch.

white balance correction, if no channels are clipped, the "invert>gamma>invert" technique i posted a while ago works perfectly. also for exposure fix.

if "advanced" shadow/highlight is required, i use photoshop to process video. if white balance is required, and channels are clipped, i use photoshop too with colormancer plugin (free), which is amazing for this kind of situation.

not the perfect workflow, but do what i need.

The rectangle problem I reported earlier has disappeared. It was I small rectangle that appeared it the preview window. It did not show up on the rendered video.
Also since it was throughout the project there is no reason to suspect the two plugins that I tried. The plugins were FBmn and NewBlue Essentials 2.

Thanks

You could try brightness and contrast x 2 centre 16 on one and centre 80 on the other giving you control over independent spectrum levels.

@Rory Cooper

Manipulating levels is not going to address the issue I raised in my post of 11/26/2011 1:25:50 AM, when you need to separate two regions, one in shadow and the other ih highlight which happen to have similar levels before any treatment. Futhermore, you don't want to spoil the contrast in either region.

Thanks Peter for the direction. Interesting topic and very difficult to get just right.

I was wondering what others felt about techniques to separate levels. I have NB essentials and they come in very handy when you need them.
I have done a rip a few times through Photoshop but for me not worth the hassle.

If you come with any solutions please give us a heads up.