Lumetri Scope - Luma Waveform for correcting exposure

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at something called the Luma Waveform. That's this thing here, it is controlling, or at least visualizing the lights and darks in our image, the contrast, the exposure, the luma, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to show you how we can control it, over here in our Lumetri Color panel. 

Can you see at the top here, look at all those whites, they're all jammed up with the Type. Let's liberate them, oh, look at that, and maybe the blacks need adjusting, or the highlights. I'm just dragging things now, but you can see, I can control the tone, over here, and visualize it here in the Luma Waveform. All right, let's jump in and get to know it. 

To get started I've imported Color Correction G, I brought it in and I've muted it, because there's some coffee splashing noises from my kitchen, and what we did in the Essentials course, the kind of basic use of the Lumetri Color panel, is to play around, under 'Basic Correction', 'Tone', and then start playing with, like I like to start from the bottom, go to the 'Blacks', and kind of get what you want, and the 'Whites', oh yeah, there we go, somewhere in there, and you're doing it, and you're like, "That's cool," but that waveform is going to really help us. 

I'm going to 'Reset' that. To find all the Lumetri Scopes, you can just click on 'Color' as a preset', and it kind of throws some up here. Yours is going to look different from mine, because I've been playing around, yours probably starts off looking, let it get back to normal. So yours probably looks like that, maybe. I've adjusted my size, just so I can see the waveform for you. 

Now we're going to be looking at the Luma Waveform. So by default, probably on yours, unless you'd be messing with it, you've got Waveform RGB selected, it's got a little tick next to it, and it's set to the Waveform set to 'RGB'. That's fine, what we're going to be using it for is Luma. Now you will find tutorials, I don't use the Luma Waveform RGB, some people do, I don't, we're not going to cover every single one of them, so many options in here. 

So what we're going to do, and it's very common to do, is to use the waveform, but have it on 'Luma'; what does Luma mean, do you remember? Luma means that there is, it's the brightness, luminance. You can instantly see, can you see, up the top here, this is smash right at the top, it's at 100 ire; ire is a measurement that we use in video, and it just like, the acronym is like the international radio engineers, something like that. It's just like, that is as high as the measurement could go out, for a broadcast television back in the day. You can actually go higher and lower now, but for what we need, 100 is max white and zero is max black, and you can see there, looks great, you're like, "Awesome." 

It's almost touching the blacks, but not too much. If I grab my blacks over here, can you see, if I go too low, trying to fix it, can you see, I start losing all the blacks in here, they start smooshing together. They call that Clipping, where they're all kind of mashed at the bottom there. You can see over here, in my waveform. So we don't want that, so this Scope is really handy to go. I want the blacks, I'm just going to leave those where they were, and it's the whites here that need a bit of work. 

Can you see, most of the information's down the bottom here, but this is like, squished to the top. So I'm going to work with my whites, and this is like, even if you take nothing else of this course, you're like, "I'm not going to use Scopes," it is really interesting to see what this control here is doing to the scopes, especially undertone. So let's look at whites, and keep an eye, over here, I'm going to drag whites down, can you see it? 

So that's unpicking it from this top there, look at that, there's some information all the way up here. I'm going to undo it by double clicking anywhere on this line. So back down here, you can see, the white's coming back now in the glass, and I get a bit more detail, and how far do you go? You just want it to be in this kind of like 90 area. You don't have to be like bang up 100, doesn't have to be like maximum to the tippy top. You can clip things off, like we talked about my shiny point in my forehead, that gets really shiny, and if I lower this down, to like accommodate the shiny reflection on my forehead, it wrecks everything else. 

So there's not-- like it's just-- what I'm trying to get at is, there's no hard and fast rules, it's about you being able to understand what you're doing with these whites, and if you are like, maybe clipping stuff, where you might have not thought you were, so let's get here. 

The other ones that are really interesting, is just working your way through. Can you see, like blacks, shadows, why are there, why is there blacks and shadows, are they not the same thing? What happens is, Premiere Pro is actually going to be adjusting, blacks, is the stuff right at the bottom here, shadows is this chunk here, close to 0. Let's have a look what it is. 

So shadows, I'm going to drag it left and right, can you see, it's not touching the bottom stuff, but it's grabbing that, like low part, the stuff in the kind of 20s and 30s, and adjusting it. So you might decide that-- actually I want to kind of bring them up a little bit, I've got a black top on the kitchen, so we don't want to get it too high. There is a lot of black in there, so there is going to be a lot of information along here. 

Let's have a look at highlights, the same thing, it's not the tippy top, it's this kind of chunk underneath it, let's have a look. Highlights, you can start-- I'm still kind of going back and forth, and looking at my-- to make sure I'm not wrecking my image, or getting it to where I want, but I'm also looking at the waveform, can you see, it's leaving the stuff at the top. So there are some nice specular highlights, is that a word? I'm just adjusting the stuff underneath it. 

You see, I've gone quite far here, but I feel more confident because I can see it. Same with Contrast, Contrast is a really interesting one, watch what happens in here. It pulls the top and the bottom, it's quite a big, it's kind of, you can see it there, but it's pulling it into the middle. So we're adjusting the contrast here, do we want the contrast to be really high, and separated? It might be a visual effect, but at least we can kind of see now in the graph, what we're actually doing here. I think I want a little bit of that. 

I'm adding contrast, and exposure, watch this, see the big shift, down, up, down, up, down. Some people-- I always start at the bottom, blacks, white, shadows, you might decide-- a lot of people will start with exposure first and then correct the rest of them. I don't know why I prefer this way, a lot of people do start at the bottom and work their way up. I find I get a better result, these are two big broad changes, I like to kind of work this way, and do a final adjustment with exposure if I need to. That's the real big broad stroke. 

Now one thing I want to acknowledge here, is that, remember, this is just a visual representation of this looking at it in a weird kind of Luma Waveform, instead of, like this, like lots of little pixels and colors. So it's only dealing with the exposure, the lights and the darks. So that's what it's good for. When I first kind of learned about it, I felt like, let's say this Lumetri, kind of tonal range here, was what actually controls this, and it's not, it's just-- you can use anything in this panel to control your lights and darks, and it will show over here. 

So for instance, let's say, let's get rid of this Basic Correction, let's say that, you're not basic anymore, you're advanced. So I'm going to go reset all that good work, and you're going to be a curves person from now on, because you're like, "I loved curves," so you are doing the exact same thing, look, I'm moving this up and down, and I'm controlling this, there's no difference. 

So it doesn't really matter, you could use a little bit of curves, a little bit of Basic Correction, and a little bit of Hue Saturation Curves, and then a little bit in here, under the HSL Secondary, they all have kind of some sort of connection to it. Let's have a little look at Curves, because that's one that I use quite a bit, so let's fix this one. 

Now in a previous tutorial I said, just do the S-Curve, and you're away-- let's wreck this one, because this one is overexposed, not on purpose, but I found this example for this particular tutorial. It doesn't work, so how do we get rid of our graph? That's right, just double click anywhere. So what I want to do is try and bring down the whites, remember, whites are at the top here, and blacks are down the bottom here, and there's whites. I need to bring down, so not just-- like I don't want to bring just this stuff, I want to break, because it's still smashed up there. I want to actually grab this first one, and actually say-- can you see, if I lower this first dot, can you see the scope coming down. Look at all the information that's in there, he was lost, and if we turn this on and off, you can see. 

So it doesn't really matter whether I'm using this or the Basic Correction. Let's do some other stuff. So the blacks, do they need to be darker or lighter? They don't need to be darker. So I don't need to drag them this way, because they get too smooshed at the bottom, but maybe I grab this part, which is the kind of darkish stuff, and do I want to make it lighter or darker? I'm looking at the graph, I'm looking at the image, it's a combo deal. I want to make them a little bit darker, and maybe the mid tones here, do I want them to be a little darker as well, or up a bit higher, can you see, mixture of looking at this, looking at the graph, you're able to manipulate the Luma Wave. 

All right, before, after. I'm happy with it, maybe even the dark’s darker, maybe some of this stuff, some of that kind of mid stuff to get darker, oh no, maybe it's this. So that is the Luma Waveform, that's our first Scope, and probably the easiest to understand, I hope so, because you're in for a treat for the next two, but yeah, it needs to do with contrast, lights and darks, the Luma. All right, let's get on to the next video.