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!
