Clamp
Limits image values to a Min-Max range with an optional soft knee, per channel or hue-preserving, for taming overbright values before delivery.
Clamp bounds every pixel to the range you set. The defaults (Min 0, Max 1) cover the standard delivery case: in a 32-bit (float) document, overbright values survive the whole graph, and Clamp is the deliberate point where you bring them back into range before export. Both limits reach from -16 to +16, so you can also clip to a narrower creative range or lift a floor.
A hard clamp cuts highlights off abruptly. Raising Softness adds a soft-clip knee (in the style of Nuke’s SoftClip): values approaching Max roll off smoothly into the limit, so bright areas compress instead of flattening into a hard white patch. Min stays a hard floor, and pixels below the knee are untouched.
Mode picks the clamping math. Per Channel limits R, G, and B independently, which is simple but can shift the hue of saturated overbright colors. Preserve Hue scales the channels together so the brightest one lands on the limit, keeping hue and saturation intact.
Parameters
Section titled “Parameters”Pins
Clamp
Lower output limit. Defaults to 0 for delivery-range clamping
Upper output limit. Defaults to 1 for delivery-range clamping
Soft-clip knee, as a fraction of the Min-Max range (Nuke SoftClip style). 0 is a hard clamp. Above 0, values approaching Max roll off smoothly into Max so highlights compress instead of clipping; shadows and midtones below the knee are left unchanged and Min stays a hard floor
Usage Tips
Section titled “Usage Tips”- Exporting with Convert to color space or Working space (no conversion) hard-clips overbrights at the format’s ceiling. Drop a Clamp in front to decide how they land instead of letting the format cut them off. The default As displayed export tone-maps highlights through the view transform, so it is WYSIWYG with the viewport and needs no Clamp. The exception is a single-channel float export: the view bake only applies to color images, so overbrights hard-clip even under As displayed, and a Clamp in front is still the fix.
- Use a little Softness (0.1 to 0.3) to keep highlight detail readable instead of flat white.
- Preserve Hue keeps neon and colored-light sources from drifting toward yellow or cyan as they clip.
- In an 8-bit document values are already in range, so Clamp mostly earns its keep in 32-bit (float) mode.