Magic Bullet Looks

Scopes Pane

Your eyes know what they like. That’s part of why we have color looks in the first place. But can your eyes truly see everything before them? No. That’s why we have scopes, because scopes just convey the values and math of your clip in a graphical format. There is no subjectivity.

Magic Bullet Looks offers five scopes to help analyze your video. The Scopes pane becomes visible when you minimize the Looks Drawer. If a scope is minimized, you can expand it by clicking its name. Try dragging the right edge of the Scopes pane to enlarge the pane’s size for easier viewing.

RGB Parade

In the RGB Parade, color channel brightness is shown as values from top to bottom in the graph. The graph shows a range of greater than 0 to 1.0 in floating point units. The range scales from 0.0 to 100.0, showing up to 100 brightness stops. You can click and drag the yellow triangle (at right) vertically to adjust the graph’s scale to display overbright information.

Overbright information will register above the 1.0 line and its yellow arrow. These values can be processed in a non-linear format like Cineon for film output, but doing so will cause solid white areas in digital formats.

Slice Graph

Imagine an image's rows and columns of pixels. Pick any row, and that row will contain an average of red, green, and blue brightness values. Blue sky will obviously contain a high average value for blue. However, too much brightness in a color channel can yield clipping, and you usually want to dial back levels to under that threshold. The Slice Graph helps with this by sampling a selected pixel row and plotting RGB brightness values on the y axis.

When you open the Slice Graph, you'll see a draggable (that should be a word) orange-yellow arrow appear on the preview window's right edge. This arrow selects the row of your image to sample. Additionally, as seen above, the Slice Graph has its own draggable arrow set at the 1.0 brightness threshold level. Dragging this arrow adjusts the graph's vertical scale in case your colors are really blown out.

Moreover, the Slice Graph can help identify improperly colored skin tones. In a situation like a close-up, you'll have a skin tone dominate a pixel row. With proper coloring, you'll see an expected color dot pattern, often with red on top, followed by green, then blue. If you see green and blue invert, for example, or if your red is higher than normal, you may need correction.

Hue/Saturation

This scope arranges hues in a ring that matches the orientation of the color controls. More saturated colors place farther out on the ring. As colors become desaturated, they move toward the ring’s center.

This scope is handy for checking skin tones. The line that points northwest is called the skin tone line, and all correctly adjusted skin tones should fall on that line. The Skin Overlay button (see below) is a helpful tool to use in conjunction with the Hue/Saturation scope when correcting skin tone. When your subject's skin tone is adjusted to be on that line, an overlay grid will show if you’re hitting the right hue.

You can also use the Hue/Saturation scope to check for color harmonies in your image. Complimentary colors appear on opposite sides of the circle. If you have clumps of color gathered opposite each other, you likely have a pleasing palette.

You can also drag the yellow triangle to zoom in and out on the Hue/Saturation scope.

Hue/Lightness

Somewhat like the Hue/Saturation scope, Hue/Lightness lays out hues in a rainbow. In this case, though, it measures hue against luminance. Use this scope to check how bright skin tones are or how close you are to blowing out your blue sky.

Memory Colors

The Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology defines a memory color as “the typical color of an object that an observer acquires through their experience with that object. For example, most people know that a ripe banana is typically yellow; this knowledge about the typical color constitutes a memory color.”

The Memory Colors scope shows an image that will appear well-balanced when the colors of certain objects approximately match our memory of what they should be. Examples include blue skies, green foliage, and the warm tone of human skin of any ethnicity. However, it can be challenging to know when your colors match these targets.

The Memory Colors scope makes it easy to tune your corrections and bring colors toward their pure tones. The scope shows a miniature copy of your image, but it only displays the memory colors of red, green, blue, and flesh tones. If your colors lack these targets, the image in the scope will appear black. Wherever your image hits memory color targets, the scope will light up with the appropriate colors.

Skin Overlay Button

The Skin Overlay button (),located near the top of the Looks UI and to the right of SCOPES, identifies skin tones by placing an orange grid over known skin areas. As you edit color values with Looks tools, the Skin Overlay grid will shrink or grow to cover areas that should be flesh tones.

Skin Overlay is a quick way to check if your skin tones are identified properly and will look correct. This gives you a good guide to color correcting for skin tones specifically, which can be a difficult task. This grid helps you set up skin colors that will align to correct skin tones on a vectorscope (a device used to measure color in video signals).

Use Skin Overlay when you want to fine tune for skin correction. For instance, activate Skin Overlay when working with the Cosmo tool or Pop tool so you can check skin tones as you work. If the orange lines increase, that means you have added true skin tone. If the lines decrease, you have removed true skin tone.