A · EXPOSURE & COLOR

Exposure clipping

The detail your sensor never recorded — and post can't invent.

By Thomas Linck, founder · Updated June 2026

Exposure clipping is what happens when pixels are pushed past what the sensor can record: highlights lock to pure white, shadows sink to solid black. A clipped area holds no detail at all, so there is nothing for any slider to recover in post. Blown highlights and crushed blacks are the two ends of the same fault.

WHY IT MATTERS

Once a window, a sky or a forehead blows out to flat white, that texture is gone for good — no grade can invent what the sensor never captured. Small specular highlights are fine; clipped skin or sky is not. Read it on a waveform or histogram before you publish, and turn on zebras so the camera warns you while you can still fix it.

TARGET · STANDARD

Highlights	no clipped skin or sky	small speculars are fine
Shadows	keep some texture	solid black reads unfinished
Check	waveform / histogram	zebras warn at record time

How CutScore measures it CutScore reads the brightness of every frame deterministically with OpenCV — the same numbers a waveform shows — and flags each stretch where highlights clip to pure white or shadows crush to black, with the timestamp. You see exactly which shots lost detail before anyone else does.

Get this measured automatically See a sample report

QUESTIONS

Frequently asked.

Can I recover blown highlights in post?

No. A clipped highlight is pure white with no detail underneath, so there is nothing to bring back. Underexposed footage can be lifted a little at the cost of noise; blown highlights are gone for good.

Are crushed blacks ever OK?

Deep blacks in areas that do not matter are fine. The problem is shadows that should hold texture — hair, clothing, a face — going solid black, which reads as unfinished. Keep some detail where the eye actually looks.