How to handle under exposed footage
Underexposed footage is a reality of the color suite. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s a technical mishap but it’s something I’ve dealt with often. Digging into underexposed footage is usually a game of managing trade offs. Pulling a signal out of the shadows doesn’t just bring up the image, it brings up the flaws.
As a colorist the first thing I will analyze is where my floor is. If I look at my scopes and I bring up the low end and it is a hard line at 0 the data is clipped and there’s no detail to pull out. If there’s a bit of a gap we have some room to play but this will involve a conversation with the DP and/or other creatives involved in color sign off. Exposure at this stage is a bit of a zero-sum game. While increasing the lift of the image we will be exposing more noise and macro blocking.
Cranking Gain and/or Offset is a very blunt way to approach this problem. Granted, that was my method for years as a young colorist. Now I immediately reach for my contrast and pivot controls. This allows me to stretch my midtones while keeping the shadows anchored. I will also lean heavily on my log controls over the lift/gamma/gain tools as they have a tighter cutoff allowing me to preserve highlights and ratios better.
As mentioned earlier, lifting underexposed footage will increase noise. No question. There are mainly two ways of dealing with this in the color suite. The first is noise reduction. All professional color grading software has some variety of noise reduction software. There are also third party plugins like Neat Video that can be very useful. However, at the end of the day nose reduction is blurring. You can only take it so far before the image starts to suffer or start to appear plastic-y. Another option, which is dependent on the overall look of the piece, would be to add a grain texture. This can mask some of the digital artifacts of noise reduction and make it feel slightly more organic and cinematic. Also when you lift the shadows you can lose saturation or get strange color shifts in the low end. The Sat/Luma curves can be a helpful tool in bringing life back to the shadows where the sensor was unable to pick up information.
Also, if you are a DP and are intentionally shooting underexposed to get a heavy contrast look that leans into the shadows, communicate that to the colorist early so that we don’t spend too much time trying to preserve shadow detail that doesn’t need to be preserved.
Underexposed doesn’t have to be a horrible situation as long as you understand the limitations in post and what the colorist can do to try to ameliorate the situation. Unless of course underexposed is the exact look you’re going for and the colorist understands and knows the vision. Then lean into those shadows!
