CC Challenge - Overexposed

[overnighttolondon]

Hey guys, bit of a problem here. I've got a shot that's a couple stops over, I need to try and curve it back to something acceptable. Anyone want to take a stab at it?

Properly exposed reference shot (raw):

Properly exposed reference shot (color corrected):

Overexposed shot (raw):

Overexposed shot (color corrected):

It's actually even worse in some tighter shots from this angle, but you get the idea. Especially pay attention to the flesh tones. Thanks for the help guys

 

[Matt Grunau]

How did you pull the mids out of his shirt so well? THat's impressive. The first raw clip looks better to me than the fixed one, and the second corrected one looks better the the original. The first raw and second corrected look closest to me.

 

[overnighttolondon]

On that reference shot, could be my monitor but the raw one was looking a little too light to me.

My CC so far has been a luma curve and then a bit of secondary colour correction, mostly some desaturation and darkening. Here's what my luma curve looked like:

Part of my problem is I can't even quite put my finger on why I don't like the look of the CC on the overexposed image. I mean, I obviously can't be expecting the world cause I threw away a lot of highlight detail, and I'm no longer using all of the dynamic range (I don't think I have any whites over 80% or so).

Here's the closer shot, you get a much better idea of the skintone problems:
Raw:

With CC:

Is this as good as I'm going to get? It's not bad, but look at the highlight in her hair, and the skin by his cheek and on his hand. I know I have to accept a certain amount of quality loss stopping down like this, but there's still something unnatural about it, it makes for a bit of a jarring cut.

 

[holditnowfilms]

Pull down the saturation. and Add a some green/cyan to the mix.

 

[Pukki]

The raw image has absolutely no detail on the sleeve, and the corrected image has?

Pulling our legs a bit here, are you?

 

[overnighttolondon]

The raw image has absolutely no detail on the sleeve, and the corrected image has?

Pulling our legs a bit here, are you?

Sorry about that, it actually looks like you're right... I'll check again, maybe I forgot to disable one of my effects when exporting. I'm not messing with you, honest

 

[overnighttolondon]

Got it - the detail got lost in the jpeg compression. It's very subtle (the darkest lines are just a blue channel drop of about 4%, so it's almost imperceptible). I'll repost higher-quality jpegs in a sec. Also keep in mind that Premiere Pro 2.0's CC engine is 16 bits per channel, which I think helps out a lot.

EDIT: Ok, even on jpeg maximum I still lose it. Here are some pngs:
Tight Overexposed No CC
Tight Overexposed With CC
Wide Overexposed No CC
Wide Overexposed With CC
Reference No CC
Reference With CC

 

[Noel Evans]

Once an image is overexposed the colour information physically does not exist, Im in agreeance with Pukki on this one. I tried some cc, and whilst I thought my overall image came up ok, the sleave detail isnt there, usied 16bit on ps