White point
Also known as: white level, highlight point
The brightest value a graded image reaches, set deliberately so that highlights look clean without losing the detail inside them.
Updated
What it means
Every image has a ceiling. Where it sits decides whether the picture reads as bright and clean or as washed out, and it is the counterpart of the Black point at the other end of the range.
Standard delivery expects it near the top. Rec. 709 assumes a known maximum, and a master made brighter than that gets clipped by whatever ends up playing it.
Specular highlights are the exception that matters. Sun on water or a wet jersey can sit above the rest of the image legitimately, and flattening those is what makes an otherwise good clip look dull.
How it works in practice
Gain is the control. The highlight end of a Lift gamma gain adjustment moves it without touching the shadows, which is where setting the range starts. Everything else happens inside it.
Scopes decide it rather than a screen. A Waveform shows exactly where the top of the image sits, and a bright monitor makes that impossible to judge by eye with any confidence at all.
Shooting with headroom is what gives the choice. A flat profile keeps information above what a display can show, and Tone mapping is how that gets brought down gracefully rather than clipped.
What to watch out for
Pushing it too far clips permanently. Highlight clipping discards the information at export, and a white sky cannot be recovered from a file that no longer contains it. Nothing invents detail afterwards.
Pulling it down too far reads as unfinished. An image with nothing near white looks flat and grey, which is the washed-out look an ungraded clip already has.
Mixed cameras disagree at this end as much as the other. Two bodies with different ceilings cut badly, so Color matching has to settle both ends before any look is applied.
How RawClip handles it
The bright end is brought into agreement across the assembled sequence, so one clip does not read as glaring next to its neighbour. Material shot with headroom survives that step with its highlight detail intact rather than flattened into a single value.