Brighten or darken a video

Which control to reach for

• Brightness shifts every pixel up or down. Good for footage that is uniformly too dark, but push it far and the blacks turn gray and flat.
• Shadows is gamma. It lifts the dark and middle parts of the picture while leaving the bright parts roughly where they are, so a clip shot against a window can be opened up without the window itself going white. For most underexposed footage this is the control to reach for first.
• Contrast stretches the gap between light and dark. This is usually what "looks washed out" actually needs.
• Saturation is color intensity. Lifting brightness often leaves color looking thin, and a small saturation bump puts it back.

What cannot be recovered

Detail that was never captured is gone. If the highlights are clipped to pure white or the shadows crushed to pure black, brightening reveals nothing there, it only makes the flat area lighter. Small corrections work well; rescuing badly exposed footage does not.

An order that works

Correcting exposure in the wrong order means fighting yourself, because each control changes what the next one is acting on. A sequence that reliably lands:

1. Shadows first. Lift the dark and middle tones until faces and detail are readable. This does most of the work on underexposed footage and leaves the bright areas alone.
2. Contrast next. Lifting shadows always flattens the picture, so put the separation back. This is the step people skip, and it is why corrected footage often looks washed out.
3. Brightness last, and sparingly. By this point it is a small final nudge rather than the main lever.
4. Saturation to finish. Colour tends to look thin after the picture has been opened up. A small bump restores it; a large one gives you sunburn and neon.

All four run through FFmpeg's eq filter in a single pass, so ordering them this way costs nothing extra. There is one encode regardless of how many controls you move.

Grade once, not twice

Because this is a real re-encode, every trip through it is another generation of loss. Doing three passes to creep up on a look costs three encodes, and the third is working on material already softened by the first two. It is much better to decide the settings on a short test clip and then apply them once to the whole thing. Cut ten seconds out with cut video, try settings on that, and run the full file when you are happy.

Drop the quality number to 18 if the clip will be edited or encoded again afterwards, so the next pass is not building on a compromised picture.

Where this is the wrong tool

These controls apply to the whole clip, evenly, from first frame to last. Footage where the exposure changes partway through, someone walking from shade into sun, a camera auto-adjusting, needs different corrections at different times, and one setting will be wrong for half of it. The editor applies colour per piece of the timeline, so you can split at the change and grade each side separately.

Common questions

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