Fixing overexposed footage

Just as underexposure is a problem, so is overexposure, and this is just really problematic and easy to do when shooting video. When you use a video camera, you often don't have proper monitoring or you're in run-and-gun situations, so achieving a proper exposure can be a challenge. Fortunately, Photoshop makes it easy to fix. This particular shot is a tad overexposed, I could see this in the histogram, because it's starting to slam to the right edge here and we're missing some of the details in the blacks. I'll go ahead and click on the shot in the timeline to make sure it's selected, and it'll automatically choose it in the layers panel. Let's go ahead and do a levels adjustment, and I could pull the blacks in and adjust the output value for the white. That's going to lower it down, so it doesn't clip as much.

We can then pull the middle slider here to balance it out, and that's looking pretty good. I'll just click to redraw the histogram and that's looking more balanced. If I toggle that off and on, you see that the overexposure has been properly compensated and we've recovered lots of the detail. Let's go ahead and just follow that up with a little bit of a Vibrance adjustment, and I'm going to bring the overall Saturation up a bit and pull the vibrance down to reduce the greens in the background. Now the shot is looking better saturated as well, a small, but subtle change.

All of the Adjustment layers are properly clipped over in the Layers panel and that shot is fixed.