Also try the "Levels" plug-in.

Thanks Musicvid and Marco;  I will experiment with those FX.

There's also the lowly Color Balance, which also has sliders for high-mid-low in each color channel.

I'm glad Marco mentioned Levels. The individual RGB gamma sliders are excellent for beginners, because they don't mess with endpoint levels as much.

When fiddling with levels curves to lift shadows, I have found that the best curve seems to be a hill in the darker half of the range, with the 0:0 point unchanged. This preserves the contrast within the shadows as they are made brighter. Where the gradient of the curve is less than 45 degrees you will lose contrast. This section should correspond roughly to levels where the histogram is low between the shadows peak(s) and well-lit peak(s). Sorry, but this is dificult to describe, but playing around will be the best teacher.

Ideally, the shadows area should be "masked" with feathering and the region as a whole made brighter regardless of the brightness of individual pixels that are deemed to be in shadow. You have to be careful with the mask feathering to avoid halos. I do this often with still photos but know of no video software that works this way except perhaps the shadow/highlight function in Premiere Pro and After Effects, which seems to include elements of this approach.

To illustrate why simply playing with curves is not going to do the best job possible, consider the facade of a building that is half in shadow and half sunlit. The walls have been painted light brown and the window and door frames have been painted dark brown. It just so happens that the frames in sunlight are the same color and brightness as the walls in the shade. If you brighten all pixels that are the colour of the walls in the shade, you will also brighten the window and door frames that are sunlit, which you don't want to do. If you mask the shadows first, you avoid this problem.

NewBlue Video Essentials II has a shadow/highlight plugin that is pathetic. As you raise the shadows you lose the natural contrast in them.

Frederic Baumann has a new Exposure plugin but I haven't tried it yet.

EDIT

I have now tried it but as you lift the shadows, you lose contrast. Not good.

NewBlue ColorFast - Don't leave home without it!

Just mastering levels and gamma is enough to keep most mortals occupied for years.

And color correcting (not grading, which is subjective) using Curves is something no one should take on without having some understanding of trilinear coordinates, a kind of mental gps to keep one's vision tethered.

Any of the plugins being suggested are more-or-less intelligent in ways that our eyes are not; and will always do a better job of preserving bits during correction than eyes aided by only a preview, scales and scopes.

I need to add that it hasn't always been this way. I consider the advent of digital monitors as being about the time when algorithms began to show promise for doing better than a set of highly qualified human eyes. Same with the demise of analog music. Eyes and ears are simply better adapted to a world less defined by discrete units.

And color correcting (not grading, which is subjective)

In my opinion already color correcting is subjective unless you have a true representation of the scene you have shot as a reference next to you or a reference card in every shot. HDR recordings and stills for example may contain more detail in shadows then actually observed with your own eyes but which one is now correct.

I have modified my post above re FBmn software "Exposure". I don't think it is useful to lift shadows.

in my tests, the only "true" shadow & highlights like photoshop is Hitfilm Shadow & Highlights. newblue and other ones are worst to "pathetic". the photoshop method of processing cannot be reproduced using levels or curves styles of plugins.

for exposure i still recommend the invert > levels > invert method (do a inverted logarithmic adjustment) to do a exposure-like modification (use gamma slider)

for exposure i still recommend the invert > levels > invert method (do a inverted logarithmic adjustment) to do a exposure-like modification (use gamma slider)

Which I still have bookmarked at https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/help-with-over-exposure--70669/ and https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/color-correction-and-white-balance--80727/ Nice to see you on the new forum malowz!

"NewBlue ColorFast - Don't leave home without it!"

I can't see where to adjust contrast. The results after lifting shadows are disappointing for me. Try Premiere Pro or After Effects shadow/highlight effect to see what can be done.

A card in every shot  is far from an adequate reference for color correcting. So is any instrument that purports to mimic or synthesize the human eye's response to multiple stimuli. So far, no post-analysis method has come up with a way to replicate color memory, the single most important tool in color correcting, as Nick, Grazie, and other attuned individuals here might tend to agree. The notion of color memory loses the presumption of subjectivity as the results become more repeatable, and more and more original observers experience triggered physiological responses when first seeing the results. The studies on this were run in the seventies.

Color correction is done to suit the collective observer, not sensors and computational models. The pre-qualification done with scopes, algorithms, and the like is better than the eye can do because it preserves more data. So the stupidest thing to do is to say we don't need the tools. However, the tools can fail miserably because they are largely agnostic. So the second stupidest thing is to say that color correcting is finished at that point, and we must all accept the results as being "correct." Nonsense. Pink is pink, and if 80% of observers say it is pink, you had better listen before trying to sell it to them.

To say that disqualifies color correcting as science is extrapolated thinking, and we would need to look at medicine, navigation, sports, software, education, technology, and a host of other human disciplines to see if they should be reclassified as art, independently of their stated purposes.

Indeed, the theory of pure science for over a century recognizes that the observer and the data are inseparable. To rely only on our eyes for color correction is as stupid as relying only on equipment, unless, of course, the corrected image will be viewed only by other equipment. To say that either is correct on their own is ignorant, because they will always be different.

I'd appreciate to be educated on the failures of ColorFast. Anybody wish to show me the error of my ways?

I like the way CF gives me Masks to apply the controls; preserve skintones and shaped masks. I also use the Vegas toolset for those tricky occasions and Magic Bullet Looks, 'cos it's plenty big fun!

I'll not find failure in your software, Grazie, but i will offer an example from the lores of photofinishing:

If I  handed you a picture of a poodle and asked you to color correct it or create a subject mask in Colorfast, would it be helpful to know first that I had dyed the pooch light green for St. Paddy's Day? Well,is the bride's gown neutral or ivory?That's  where memory and a bit of intuition tempered by experience can help. Just being relative doesn't make memory unscientific,  'specially if the bride's (or poodle's) mother says it's right.

If there exists an auto correction software that knows this and knows how to override a correction without human intervention, ... well, in a production environment, red herrings can pop up hundreds of times each day. Remember the "is the dress blue or is it gold" silliness?

Thank you. Most "illuminating". 

I have tried three shadow lightening utilities with frame grabs here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ithvryhq4luqb51/AADKLgHWfog_U-KZWzkr1H1Qa?dl=0

(Press the details button to see the file names.)

My favourite is still Premiere Pro. Can anyone improve on it?

I think this is pretty natural, and brings/keeps the highlights/shadows within TV levels (note I switched preview to TV at the top with the extension that malowz just posted). Assuming you're delivering video, all of yours will clip on TV and the web.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21489814/curves-peterduke.png

p.s. image upload to the forum is down again

Really, gamma is enough shadow expansion for all consumers and most mortals. It also deters us from making decisions that will unnecessarily reduce that all-important bit depth in the product, in many cases.

I see the old hobbyist vs. production discussion creeping up, soo maybe this one has run its course.