Exposure fix
Also known as: exposure correction, exposure recovery
Correcting a clip that was recorded too bright or too dark, which works inside narrow limits and fails completely beyond them.
Updated
What it means
Exposure in post is recovery, not adjustment. The information either survived in the file or it did not, and brightening a clip only reveals what was already recorded. Nothing is added by the slider.
The two directions fail differently. Underexposure hides detail in noise, which Denoise can partly recover; overexposure loses it entirely, and Highlight clipping has nothing to bring back.
Format decides how much room exists. A 10-bit color file in a flat profile tolerates two stops; an 8-bit clip with a baked look tolerates considerably less than that before it falls apart.
How it works in practice
Shadows are lifted with a curve rather than a brightness control. Raising the bottom of a Curves adjustment leaves the highlights where they were, which keeps the clip from looking washed.
Noise reduction runs before the grade. Lifting first and cleaning second bakes the grain into the lifted values, which is harder to remove than the original. The order is not negotiable.
Matching comes after. A rescued clip rarely lands where its neighbours sit, so Color matching is what stops the repair from being visible at the cut. A fixed clip should not announce itself.
What to watch out for
Blown highlights cannot be recovered. A white sky or a sunlit jersey at the top of the range holds no information at all, and Zebras on the camera are what prevent the problem.
Automatic exposure during a clip is worse than a wrong fixed value. A pass from shade into sun that the camera corrected mid-shot needs Keyframe animation to repair, and the result rarely looks natural.
Heavy lifting also reveals compression. Pulling three stops out of a high Bitrate clip is plausible; out of a heavily compressed one it produces blocks rather than picture, and no amount of smoothing hides them.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are brought to a usable brightness and matched to each other while the sequence is assembled, which handles the ordinary cases quietly. A clip with blown highlights or buried shadows loses to better coverage of the same moment, because the information is not in the file.