The Hidden Tool That Will Help You Color Grade

Today I'm going over a fairly hidden feature in Final Cut Pro that'll help you create more professional-looking color grades. Before I knew about it, I'd be grading and constantly wondering if I was blowing out my highlights past 100 or crushing my blacks below 0. It was tough to tell. This fixes that.

Turn on Range Check

Go to View → Range Check → Luma. Now zebras pop up whenever you're losing detail by pushing past the 0 or 100 IRE markers on your waveform. Say you want to expand your dynamic range by raising your highlights and lowering your shadows, it's genuinely hard to tell by eye when you cross those lines. With luma range check on, the zebras show you exactly when you've gone too far, so you just back off until they disappear. It saves your detail, and honestly it helps you grade faster since it tells you instantly.

It catches oversaturation too

Here's the part most people miss. Say you stylize your grade, pull some cyan into the shadows, push orange into the highlights, really crank that orange. Your luma waveform looks totally fine, no clipping, no zebras. But switch Range Check over to Saturation and suddenly zebras show up, telling you the very brightest highlights are way oversaturated. No bueno, and you never would've caught it by eye.

Fix it with the Luma vs Sat curve

Now that you know, here's the fix. Open a Hue/Saturation Curves correction and go to Luma vs Sat. All this does is let you adjust the saturation of different brightness values. Click the dropper, select that bright value (it'll show up far to the right of the line since it's so bright), and drag down to lower its saturation in a gradual ramp. Watch the zebras disappear. That one small change makes a bright glare or a blown-out light look way more realistic, since it should be closer to white, not glowing with color. It's a problem I see all the time in grades, and we're usually too blind to even notice it. That's exactly why keeping one, or both, of these range checks up while you grade is so helpful.