Correcting Dark / Under Exposed Footage

[Tom619]

Hi All,

I've been tasked at improving some dark SD footage. It's my opinion that the footage can't be brightened to a level that makes the subjects sufficiently visible but I just wanted to double check here to see if there is anything extra I can do. The footage is of a dark club night, and most of the footage is almost or completely black. Ideally, we would be able to see more of the people in the footage, but as the exposure is so low, I'm not sure we can make any of the detail of them visible. I've attached a clip from the film. Let me know your thoughts.

[lollo]

Try hdragc(corrector=0.5) (play with parameters for best result) or similar, and eventually a temporal denoise after (i.e. TemporalDegrain2(degrainTR=3))


[Attachment 75340 - Click to enlarge]

[Tom619]

Thanks for the reply! I don't have hdragc as I'm using Hybrid (VapourSynth) version 2022.03.20.1 on Mac. I've tried to recreate using Smooth Levels but I'm not sure I'm getting too much extra detail, is there anything I can use on Hybrid to get a similar result?

[Selur]

iirc old Hybrid Mac version has Retinex, using that and TemporalDegrain should produce similar results.

I used:

# color adjustment using Retinex
clip = core.retinex.MSRCP(input=clip, sigma=[25,80,250], fulls=True, fulld=True)
# removing grain using TemporalDegrain2
clip = G41Fun.TemporalDegrain2(clip=clip, degrainTR=3, degrainPlane=4, meAlgPar=False, postFFT=0, fftThreads=1)

tweaking the Retinex settings might even result in a minimal better results, but all in all there isn't much you can do with this clip.

Cu Selur

[Tom619]

Amazing, thank you Selur!