On 25 Nov 2002 00:42:59 -0600, Merlin wrote:

>I'm hoping someone could give me a few pointer here. What I've got is
>a little footage that was taped on a miniDV of some children for a
>Christmas program. I've imported the footage into Premiere, and it's
>really dark. What I'd like to do now is have the ability to select
>various areas in some scenes and lighten only the selected areas.
>I've found Premiere will lighten the entire clip, but is there
>anything out there that's reasonably inexpensive that can do this?

You can perform wonders on dark footage with Premiere!
First add with the brightness-contrast filter just a bit
of lightening (you may need to compensate with a bit of
contrast increase to maintain the blacks), then apply the
"levels" filter, which permits lightening the middle
tones without moving the blacks and whites. With a little
experimenting, you can make the image look much better
(judge the results on TV, though - not on your computer
monitor [send out tests occasionally]). I happen to have
some DPS plug-in filters with a two-point tone-adjust,
and this works better, but "levels" should get you close
enough...