Ok so looking at the technique I used for trying to undo black crush one of the parts I think I went wrong with was the screen capping and not changing the Gout to be anamorphic and my screen resolution being a different size to the actual video source. At the end of the day I would not be doing this technique using screen caps if I was doing it to actually get a result for a project. But as a demo it is good enough to demonstrate how to.
This technique can be used to replace highlights from an alternate source but you would need to switch / invert the Luma key to focus on highlights. (My software does not have this option).
So talking about blown highlights when you have blown highlights in every source and there is no replacement to key in as it’s a problem when the filming took place not the transfer.
This shot just really annoyed me because of the guys hat and it would always draw my eyes to his hat rather than anything else. So I had no alternative replacement but I really wanted to deal with this issue.
This was the eventual fix. Something I am not personally too keen on using as it generally messes things up… But in terms of dealing with blown highlights when you have no alternative version to draw from it does a pretty good job of lessening the problem. Basically the process was color correct the footage how you want it. Then add selective correction to blown parts. I think this had six counts of selective correction to bring down the whites to a level that matched the rest of the hat and also de-saturation on the blown hues. This then made this problem far more subtle rather than glaring in your face fluro hat. Afler this was done I rendered the clip and then put this rendered clip in the timeline as a replacement and color corrected again after this process was done. This is very much a hammer and chisel approach to dealing with blown highlights when you have no alternative but want to fix it somehow. Bear in Mind that the contrast needs fixing on this also but it is more or less the finished shot.
So there is an interesting way to deal with the no alternative source for blown highlights. Shadows or black obviously you can not do this with.
Best I could do finished shot