I've made a ton of color grading tutorials on the channel
and plan to make a whole lot more.
But one question I've always gotten is:
why don't you ever use the color grading scopes in your tutorials?
Well, let's find out!
[Cinecom's intro music]
Hey guys, Jordy here for cinecom.net,
and I'm gonna start with a thank you to ASUS, today's sponsor,
for sending me their brand new PA 32 UC monitor.
This is a professional reference monitor.
It has a whopping 1000:1 contrast ratio, it comes with a wide color gamut
that provides all of these color spaces right here,
and if you're not editing in a dark room,
then the 1000-nit brightness will definitely come in handy!
As a reference, the average monitor sits around at 400 to 500 nits.
HDR, built-in LUT's and that list continues.
It has been pre-calibrated in the factory under a Delta-E of 2.
honestly, I didn't know what that was either,
but I learned from Potato Jet, who did a complete guide about this monitor,
that a Delta-E under 2 is like crazy good!
The monitor also comes with an X-Rite calibrator tool,
which you can use to calibrate your monitor in the future
or maybe calibrate your old monitor.
Anyways, as you can hear, I’m super pumped up by this monitor.
It does come with a price tag, but if you’re serious about color correction and grading,
then it's definitely a monitor worth looking at.
You can follow the first link in the description below to learn more
and I'm also going to leave a link to Potato Jet's video!
Now, why don't I use scopes?
Well, as we all know, color correction or color grading
is the process of changing the exposure levels and colors to fix your shots
or to achieve a creative look that helps you tell your story.
And the way I see it is that you have two kinds of projects.
The first one are the hub -projects.
These are things like vlogs, quick travel videos,
or even a client who only gives you one day to edit.
You don't have the time to fine-tune every single detail.
And when we talk about the video scopes,
it's going to take a little more time than if we would just apply
a global color grading over our shots.
But then there're the Hero-Projects.
The short film that you're working on,
the commercial video that you really need to fine-tune in every detail.
Here it's best that you don't apply one color grading to everything,
but take a look at each individual shot
and use the video scopes to measure your adjustments.
So, I never really wanted to bother anyone with the scopes
as I've always tried to explain how to make a creative look.
But okay, let's get technical!
Inside Adobe Premiere Pro, we can go up to the Menu: Window
and from there choose the Lumetri Scopes.
This is a tool that can help you during the color grading process
to measure the exposure levels, colors and saturation.
It's like going outside to feel for yourself
whether or not you should put on a jacket before you leave the house.
You kinda guess what the temperature is and make a decision based off from that.
But you can also measure the temperature.
You don't even need to go outside for that.
It is way more precise than guessing how warm it is outside.
But, did you ever decide to take your jacket with you or not
based off the temperature number?
I don't think so.
You just quickly open the door and just kinda feel for yourself
weather or not you should put on your jacket.
And it's kind of the same with color grading.
You don't look at your scopes and do your entire color grading like that.
No, you look at your monitor,
decide whether or not your color grading looks good
based off what you see and not what you measure.
Now, any colorist watching right now probably wants to shoot me.
Because professional editors -and definitely, colorists-
do relay heavily on those scopes.
So then, what’s the deal here?
Well, let's first have a look at what the scopes actually do.
There're two kinds of scopes that I wanna take a look at in this video
and we're gonna start off with the Waveform.
Right-click in your scopes and choose Waveform Luma.
If you right click again, you can disable the other scopes if you like.
You can have up to 4 different scopes opened here.
What's currently in my timeline is just a simple tile from black to white
and some grey variations in the between.
When looking at the Waveform we can already see the same shape coming back.
The left side of the Waveform is also the left side of my clip,
so this perfectly represents my shot.
The middle grey bars are also the middle of the Waveform.
On the bottom of the Waveform we can find the blacks
and on top the whites, and everything else falls in between.
On the bottom, we can find 0, which is absolute black
and on top is 100, which is absolute white.
It's the same as percentage, but we use the fancy term IRE,
which stands for Institute of Radio Engineers,
which probably makes no sense at all,
but they are those guys who came up with it.
Anyways, we talk about 0 IRE when something is pitch black.
we can also see it right here at the first black bar.
If you wanna know at which exposure level the third bar lays,
I can look that up into my Waveform and see that it sits around 45 IRE.
Alright, we get it!
Let's bring a real shot into Premiere Pro.
A beautiful rock of some kind of volcano, I think.
Anyways, I wanna find out where the brightness level of that rock sits.
So, I start looking at the middle of the Waveform.
And there're kinda two levels right here, a brighter and a darker.
And when looking at my shot,
that is normal because the sky above the rock is brighter.
The rock itself is the darkest and the grass underneath is a little bit brighter.
So this tells me that around the 10 IRE, I can find my rock
and the sky above the rock sits around 60 IRE.
So, that is how we can read the Waveform.
We’ve got a lot of room, we're not coming close to 0 or 100 IRE.
So let's increase the exposure for this shot.
To my eyes now it seems like this is the maximum I can go.
Before I crush the sky in the back.
But here's the interesting part.
The Waveform tells me that there still is a little bit of space.
Of course we don't wanna push the highlight against the 100 IRE line,
because that will overexpose the shot.
But we can increase it a little bit more to go around 98 IRE.
So there's that first advantage of using the scopes.
With the ASUS monitor, I can judge my shots pretty close.
But if you're using a monitor that is not so great or not calibrated,
your first guess might be completely wrong.
Where you think a shot is already over exposed, it might only be at 90 IRE.
And the same thing goes about colors, which we'll dive in later.
Now, this does not mean that we should always take up the entire space.
When I color correct this shots, to utilize the entire contrast, it's definitely not wrong,
but from a creative choice, it might be too much contrast.
So, let's have a look at the next example.
These here are two shots of an old radio.
A long shot and a close up.
We wanna create a low-contrast washed out look.
So what I'm gonna do is bring up the blacks and aim them around 10%,
or 10 IRE.
As for the whites, let's bring that down so that the maximum is 80 IRE.
To make the close-up match with the other one,
I can use the scopes to also push the blacks up to 10 IRE
and the whites down to 80 IRE.
So, that is the super basics of the Waveform and how it works.
But we've only been talking about the exposure so far.
In the next example, let's have a look at colors and skin tones.
Here we've got a breakfast scene with a lot of contrast and colors.
From the Lumetri scopes, I'm gonna right-click and choose vectorscope Y-U-V.
The vectorscope resembles the color wheel
and the white are the colors within that color wheel, which come back in our shot.
The further they peak, the more saturated the colors are.
And we can see that very good when I increase the saturation.
So, like with the Waveform, we can already understand that this tool
can help us to match different saturation levels.
But that's not all, we can also use the vectorscope to get the skin tones right.
For this, we're gonna have to isolate them.
I'm going to create a mask around a portion of the skin tones.
This will will only show that part of the clip on the vectorscope.
What I can tell now is that the skin tones are too red.
And I can see that because this line right here
between the red and the yellow represents the skin tones.
And our highlight should be on that.
So, let me do some color corrections
to bring that highlight onto the skin tones line.
When we now remove the mask and look at the before and the after,
we can straight away see that the skin tones look a lot better.
Here's another great example on how to use the vectorscope.
You wanna create this ‘Teal & Orange’ look.
So with the color wheel you push teal or blue into the shadows,
to make them deeper and stronger.
But this will offset the rest of the colors,
so you're gonna have to compensate with orange in the mid tones.
But look what happens at the vectorscope.
All your colors are being pushed around.
And when I enable that mask again,
you can see that the skin tones are not correct anymore.
So I make sure that when I add orange in my mid tones,
I pay attention to the vectorscope and aim the highlight into the skin tones line.
And this will give me a clean teal and orange look
without having the actors look like pumpkins.
And that's the super basics of how you can use that vectorscope!
There's a lot more that these tools can help us with,
but I'm gonna leave it with these basics for now.
If you would like to see more content about this videoscopes,
then definitely let us know in the comments below.
I really hope that you guys enjoyed this video,
Thank you so much for watching, thank you ASUS for the gorgeous monitor,
and like always:
Stay Creative!
It’s Creative Tuesday, we’re currently making the photo for Instagram!
-Come on, Jordy, be beautiful.
-I am beautiful!
-This is the most ridiculous shoot I’ve ever seen.
-I feel like one of those Instagram girls!