darken / brighten 3.0u

darken / brighten 3.0u is considered as a general color effects plug-in which features do sound a bit boring: it allows you to make parts of your clip darker or brighter. Still, the plug has some amazing capabilities that elevate it above most of the other one-trick pixel-pushers.

It allows parallel darkening and brightening with relative and absolute values, allowing you to apply some special effects that would usually require multiple passes (and multiple plug-ins).

The algorithm first applies the relative darkening or brightening, without applying any clipping to brightness. It then applies the absolute darkening/brightening, and only then clips the pixels value to the legal range.

Use this tool when you need to adjust the brightness of a clip. remember that with all cf/x clips you can choose the area of effect. therefore you can use it to introduce stylish-looking darker bars at the top and bottom or at the sides of the clip. or you can use it to spotlight an interesting part of the clip (either by making the interesting area brighter, or everything else darker).

Using a combination of relative and absolute settings (in the same run!) you can achieve wash-out as well as heightened contrast effects.

Major Features:

1. Area of effect:
   • Define the area of the clip you want to be affected by the plug-in. all other parts of the clip remain untouched.
2. Relative
   • Use this slider to increase relative (=proportional) brightness in the affected area. this means, for example, that an already dark pixel will be darkened less than a bright pixel. you can adjust relative from -100% to +100%
3. Absolute
   • Each pixel will be brightened or darkened by a fixed amount. a dark pixel would, for example, receive the same absolute amount of additional brightness as a light one.
4. Reset
   1. Resets both relative and absolute sliders to neutral