Fixing underexposed video with FFmpeg

Turning potentially ruined video footage into something very much useable, like magic the dark video is back to normal, vibrant with a little bit of extra noise.

I had underxposed drone footage due to the phone screen brightness not being enough to see that i had the EV set to negative max. The footage was bad:

original 1Thats exactly how the footage was.

Using FFmpeg gamma and saturation filter i went through some values to find a sweet spot.

In the end it was -vf eq=gamma=1.7:saturation=1.7

Here are comparisons from the original underexposed footage to the FFmpeg corrected

original 4 correction 4 original 3 correction 3 original 2 correction 2 original 1 correction 1The video did get a bit more noise but now you can see what the footage contains.

Here are screen shots starting at gamma 1.2 through to 2

1.2gamma 1.3gamma 1.4gamma 1.5gamma 1.6gamma 1.7gamma 1.8gamma 1.9gamma 2gamma