How to fix a too bright & too dark issue?

[kinglerch]

This is going to be a strange description, but here goes...

I have a video where there is a bright area, too bright to see clearly so it shows up as almost pure white. But if I darken the whole video to see that area, the dark areas become way too dark. There is no level of brightness that can satisfy both parts of the video.

One idea is if there is a tool or technique to brighten just the dark areas of the video, or darken just the bright areas. Photoshop does this with some sort of mask.

Another idea is to mix the two versions (the bright and dark) and use a mask like a green screen where a certain color or a certain area would come from one video, and the rest would come from the other video.

Has anyone had to deal with a problem such as this? Any recommendations?

EDIT: I think the Overlay command from avisynth is what I'm looking for. It's a little confusing since there are so many options. I can use the "overblown white" color for a mask, or the Lighten/Darken options to copy the light information from the dark film version to the light film version.

Any suggestions on how to use the Overlay command for my purposes?

[SCDVD]

If you are seeing this on your TV but not your monitor, it may be that the luminescence range of your video is 0 to 255. TVs expect a luminescence range of 16 to 235. When the value is outside this range, it doesn't distinguish between them. You can adjust this in some editors but some do a better job than others.

[jagabo]

Gamma

[Marvingj]

Show a clip of the video, please....

[manono]

You're saying that some of the video is too contrasted and other parts are OK, aren't you, and not that the problem is within different parts of each frame?

If so, you can filter a range of frames and not filter others - or filters others differently - by using the Trim filter:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Trim

So, to filter frames 0-999 differently from 1000-1999 differently from 2000-2999 (which doesn't get filtered at all in this example):

A=Trim(0,999).Levels(x,x,x,x,x)#in which you can adjust the gamma, following jagabo's suggestion
B=Trim(1000,1999).Tweak(Cont=x.xx,Bright=xx,Coring =False)#adjust contrast and brightness
C=Trim(2000,2999)#nothing happens
A+B+C

Doing it this way, you don't need the Overlay command, but I could easily be misunderstanding you.

[guns1inger]

Any suggestions on how to use the Overlay command for my purposes?

Have a read of this post from GrannyGeek - it discusses exactly what you are after : https://forum.videohelp.com/topic335994.html