Using part of histogram to restore details

Videot wrote on 9/9/2004, 5:33 PM
When working with stills & I find a extremely dark, almost black picture I have often been able to save it by opening the histogram & dragging over a slider to find that I now have detalis that weren't visible at all before as well as having color. I think all that's happeneing when I dod this is that only the part of the histogram that has data is being expanded to cover a much wider range.

Is it possible to do a similar thing with video without having to export as simgle frames, process using another program & importing all the single frames back into Vegas?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/9/2004, 5:45 PM
It's not quite as easy as in photo editing programs, but the Color Curves effect allows you to accomplish the same thing. You just have to tug the line in slightly more tortuous ways than just moving a single slider.
rmack350 wrote on 9/9/2004, 5:58 PM
It sounds like my good friend the Levels tool in photoshop.

There is a levels tool in Vegas but the histogram to use is the scopes.

Vegas's levels tool is not quite as nice as pshop's but it does the same thing.

And curves is good too. It is a different way of looking at the task. choose the one that makes you comfortable.

Rob Mack
Chienworks wrote on 9/9/2004, 6:01 PM
I should also mention that video tends to have an awful lot more noise in dark areas than photographs do, so don't be surprised if you can't recover dark images in video as well. You'll find that you end up with a very blotchy noisy image if you have to brighten it more than a small amount. If the brightest part of the video image is less than half scale then it probably won't recover well at all.