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Post #1690149

Author
aero177
Parent topic
The Rise of Skywalker: Untold (Released)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1690149/action/topic#1690149
Date created
6-Aug-2026, 4:38 PM

It was a bit difficult to describe, but I found some photos I took of a bonfire to explain better. the flatter, dimmer looking fire comes from a night scene that is darker than real life, so the camera is exposed for the fire. When the scene is balanced, the fire will still look ‘normal’, just brighter, maybe a touch of highlights in the flame center, but the scene will still have lit detail. An overexposed night scene will look brighter than real life, and that is what causes the fire highlight clipping, but even then the clip is only the inner part of the flames, with an orange clipped highlight, just like in the TLJ frame.

in this case it makes sense for your scene to appear more evenly exposed with small hints of highlights, rather than reducing the exposure even more to pitch black, and then nuking the flame lighting, those are opposite ends of scene exposure. It seems to be early morning right before the sun rises (seeing how the lighting changes at the end of the clip), so it makes sense that scenery is visible, while not blowing out the fire.
I hope this explains what I meant! https://ibb.co/yBFk4hpS

Here is a quick lighting test I did from youtube footage (sorry for the poor quality) that hopefully shows more of what I was talking about: https://ibb.co/6JFQVv0r

The lighting can still look like dawn/night, have an intensity in the flames, and still keep the background and flame detail without extreme luminousity clipping on whites and darks.