Masking & low light scenes

[Mounir]

I have this camcorder video i shot that's really underexposed and i don't want to overexpose the brightest parts.
I guess i can do that with masking but i don't know how that works

[poisondeathray]

It might be easier to use something like hdragc ?

or a curves function like smoothcurve ? (or graphical curves, but be careful how you do the conversion if you are working in RGB)

Smoothadjust has Lmodes to limit bright areas Lmode=2

Masking darker areas and adjusting only those areas usually requires a fall off or feathering of the mask - it can be tricky. Dogway has a lumamask function which does this and you can specify the limits