Adobe Premiere CS5 ROCKS! How to save shots that are too dark

Isn’t life funny sometimes… just when you’re looking for answers, they present themselves!

In this case, I’m editing Episode II of my webseries, 7 Shades of Lenity, and we had shot a fight scene at night, and some of the footage is way too dark, and using the usual color correction plugins is way too complex, and wasn’t yielding decent results (I’m a newbie at this).
Enter Richard Harrington of RHED Pixel, an Adobe Product Evangelist with his brand new tutorial on “Equalizing Color and Exposure” on CreativeCow.Net.

This simple plugin, with 3 options and a slider, helps light up your footage that you thought was previously unusable.

Obviously, dark footage, when bumped up shows a lot of noise, so I’ve had to stick in the 2%-8% range, but the difference is clear.

So, if your shots are just a little too dark (next time, light them properly) but give Equalize a try.

Thanks a lot, Richard.

Val Gameiro
Writer, Director, Filmmaker
Austin, Texas

2 Replies to “Adobe Premiere CS5 ROCKS! How to save shots that are too dark”

  1. Jasper Tey

    I’ve always turned to colour correction to salvage dark footage, and never paid any attention to Equalize. My next video contains really dark night footage, and Equalize does help in ways colour correction can’t. Glad I stumbled upon your post here, thanks 🙂

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