Shadows
Also known as: shadow range, lows
The darkest part of an image, where detail is most easily lost and where most of the depth in a graded clip actually comes from.
Updated
What it means
Shadows are the bottom third of the range. They carry less information than the midtones and do more for the impression of depth than anything else. Nothing flattens a picture faster than lifting them.
Where they sit is a choice. The Black point sets the floor, and how much detail lives above it decides whether the image reads as rich or as murky on a large screen.
Action footage puts a lot in them. Forest, treeline, a wave face in the afternoon and anything under a helmet brim are all shadow material in an ordinary session.
How it works in practice
Lift is the control. The shadow end of a Lift gamma gain adjustment moves them without touching highlights, which is where most corrections start and the easiest thing to overdo.
Noise lives here, so order matters. Denoise runs before the shadows are opened, because lifting first bakes the grain in and makes it permanent. The sequence is not negotiable.
Scopes decide the floor rather than a screen. A Waveform shows whether anything is actually at the bottom, which a bright room makes impossible to judge by eye at all. Ten seconds with a scope settles what an hour of squinting will not.
What to watch out for
Crushing is irreversible. Crushed blacks discard the information at export, and nothing afterwards recovers a rider out of a dark treeline. The frames were thrown away, not hidden.
Lifting too far produces the washed-out look. Open shadows with no black anywhere read as unfinished, which is what an ungraded Log profile clip looks like. Flat is a starting point rather than a finish.
Mixed cameras disagree here first. Two bodies with different floors read as two cameras at every cut, which is where Color matching has to start rather than where it finishes.
How RawClip handles it
The shadow end is brought into agreement across the assembled sequence, because a difference there reads as two separate recordings more clearly than a difference in colour. A flat profile leaves detail down there to work with, where a baked-in look has none.