Fixing dark video in Kdenlive

[llloyd]

Hello! I have been recording game play footage to upload, with commentary, to Youtube. But the game is pretty dark in places. Is there a way to improve this any?

[davexnet]

Does it look this bad in the actual game? Is your capture good but the youtube version is bad?
What method was used to record it? Looks like the black levels were crushed, the shadow detail lost

[llloyd]

Does it look this bad in the actual game? Is your capture good but the youtube version is bad?
What method was used to record it? Looks like the black levels were crushed, the shadow detail lost

Looks like that in game, the above is from Kdenlive but ... Let me see... I'll attach an image that I took from the game itself though Steam's F12.

Ideally I'd find a way, though OBS, to fix it but I've tried all the filters available and didn't see one that would help any. That or if someone knows the hidden (and so far, my Google-Fu skills are failing to find ) console commands for Unreal / Q.U.B.E 2 , that'll let me adjust more than just brightness (that's the only color adjustment available in game). As you can see, the textures and stuff are there, just the devs felt the need to not include light sources. Then I could rerecord it better. This isn't the first ( and I doubt the last ) game I'll find with really bad video adjustment settings. >.<

[davexnet]

Hard to draw any conclusions from that, two different images. What corrections did you have in mind?
I took a quick look in OBS, didn't see anything obvious there

[llloyd]

Hard to draw any conclusions from that, two different images. What corrections did you have in mind?
I took a quick look in OBS, didn't see anything obvious there

Well, and take this with a grain of salt since I know little about video editing in general, I was thinking something like what Normalize does for audio. Brighten the dark areas without over brightening the light areas and bring some better balance to the two.

[poisondeathray]

I don't use kdenlive, but it has curves; so should be able brighten up the shadows selectively.
https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual/Effects/Colour_Correction/Curves

But the more you brighten, the more you will reveal the compression artifacts in the shadows, so you'd probably want to denoise in proportion to the amount you brighten. And when you denoise, you lose details, so it's a delicate balance

Also, you'd probably want to mask out the HUD elements, otherwise they will also be affected. And if they are animated or change positions, it will be more difficult

[davexnet]

Post a representative video sample from your original capture.
At least 16 seconds

[llloyd]

Post a representative video sample from your original capture.
At least 16 seconds

Does this help?

[davexnet]

The contrast range is reduced, perhaps that's typical in games.
It's pretty murky in the shadows, but even still poisondeathray's suggestion
should be tried. Use curves to very slightly brighten the values
that correspond to those shadows.
Don't you have any settings in the game itself to improve the video quality?

[llloyd]

The contrast range is reduced, perhaps that's typical in games.
It's pretty murky in the shadows, but even still poisondeathray's suggestion
should be tried. Use curves to very slightly brighten the values
that correspond to those shadows.
Don't you have any settings in the game itself to improve the video quality?

This is all the options, and brightness only makes the light areas washed out and the dark areas grey.

[davexnet]

That has nothing to do with curves, its under effects/color and image correction.
You're going to have to do some research, I can't help you with it unfortunately
https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/effects_and_compositions/effects.html