How to Fix Overexposed Video (What's Recoverable and What Isn't)

Overexposed footage comes in two flavors, and the fix depends entirely on which one you have:

1. Bright but intact — the image is washed out, but there's still detail in the bright areas. Fully fixable.
2. Clipped — the brightest areas are pure white with zero detail (a blown sky, a white blob where a face was). That data was never recorded. No slider brings it back.

Here's how to tell them apart and rescue what's rescuable — in the browser, no Resolve or Premiere needed.

Step 1 — Diagnose: bright or clipped?

Open your footage in Luttie — drop in the video and extract a frame from an overexposed section, or upload a screenshot. Pull the whites slider down hard, temporarily. If texture reappears in the bright areas (cloud detail, skin texture, fabric), you have recoverable headroom. If the areas stay as flat white shapes, they're clipped — skip to the damage-control section below.

Shooting log (S-Log3, C-Log, D-Log)? You have far more headroom than it looks — log profiles protect highlights specifically for this situation. Start from the right conversion with the log-to-Rec709 reference before judging what's lost.

Step 2 — Recover the highlights

Work in this order — each move protects the next:

1. Whites down. Pull the whites slider negative until the brightest detail comes back. Don't chase pure-white light sources; they're supposed to clip.
2. Brightness down, gently. If the whole frame is hot, reduce overall brightness — but stop before the midtones go muddy.
3. Curves for the top end. Open RGB Curves and pull the master curve down in the top quarter (around 75–90% input). This compresses just the highlights while leaving mids and shadows alone — much more surgical than a brightness slider.

Step 3 — Rebuild the contrast

Overexposure rescue flattens an image. Restore its shape:

• Bring blacks down until shadows have weight again — overexposed footage almost always has lifted, grey blacks.
• Gentle S-curve on the master channel to reintroduce midtone contrast.
• Saturation or vibrance up slightly. Overexposure desaturates; a small boost (5–15) brings color back without looking pushed.

Step 4 — Check the skin

Recovered highlights often leave skin slightly pink or yellow. Compare against the skin tone reference and correct with temperature/tint — or isolate the skin hue range with HSL secondaries if the rest of the frame is already right.

Damage control for clipped footage

When highlights are truly gone, the goal changes from recovery to making the clipping look intentional:

• Lean into a bright, airy grade. A lifted, low-contrast look with soft highlights reads as a stylistic choice; a "corrected" frame with grey blob highlights reads as a mistake.
• Warm the highlights slightly (color wheels → highlights toward gold). Clipped areas that roll into warmth mimic how film overexposes, which viewers read as pleasing.
• Add film grain (film effects, Pro) — texture over the clipped areas hides the flat digital white.

Apply the fix to the whole clip

Once one frame looks right, you don't re-grade the rest. Export the correction as a .cube LUT and apply it to the full clip in your editor — or export the graded video directly from Luttie (video export, Pro, clips up to 2 minutes).

Start with the frame that's giving you trouble: luttie.app/editor.