Color Correction, Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma

Newer cameras have excellent automatic color correction capability.  But sometimes it's nice to be able to provide some manual adjustment of your videos to get that "just right" look.  Often a video may be too dark and needs to be brightened/lightened.  This tutorial covers the basics of color correction, to include Brightness, Contrast, Gamma, Saturation, and Hue.  As always, freeware video editors are utilized exclusively to demonstrate these type corrections.

Brightness and Contrast

The most common correction that may be needed is Brightness, and with that Contrast also.   When you brighten a dark video, you may lose some definition causing the video to appear noisy or flushed.  This can be corrected by also applying a little Contrast to bring out some definition.

Gamma, Saturation, and Hue

A simple(but not entirely correct) way to explain Gamma correction is to think of it as an automatic balancing of both Brightness and Contrast.  Instead of individually adjusting Brightness and Contrast, I almost always use Gamma exclusively as it enables quick and simultaneous adjustment of brightness and contrast.  But some color may be lost in the process.  This is easily corrected by applying a little Saturation after Gamma to brighten up the colors.  Hue provides a special adjustment if the colors of your original video look abnormal.  A gently adjustment of Hue should enable you to easily bring back natural looking colors to the video. 

And here is a sample video demonstrating the application of color correction. The freeware program FileLab Free Video Editor (download it here) is used as it enables easy adjustment of each of these corrections.

Color Correction Tutorial: Brightness, Contrast, & Gamma
This video is in HD.  Click "Full Screen" in lower right corner.