---
title: "Video Scopes Explained: Waveform, Parade | colorgrade.video"
description: "How to read video scopes: the waveform, RGB parade, vectorscope and histogram, legal range, false colour and clipping, all shown on a colour chart you can open."
url: https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes
---

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3. Video scopes

Chapter 1 of 13 · Basics · 10 min read

# How to Read Video Scopes

Video scopes measure the picture instead of describing it. Your eyes adapt to whatever they look at for more than a few seconds, every screen shows colour a little differently, and a warm room or a bright window changes what you think you see. A scope reads the actual values in every pixel, so a cast, a crushed black or an over-saturated red shows up as a shape you can recognise, whatever the screen.

The studio has four scopes in the **Scopes** column on the right: **Waveform**, **Parade**, **Vectorscope** and **Histogram**, with up to two showing at once. This chapter explains how to read each one on a test chart, because a chart has known values: when you know what a grey wedge and a colour chart should look like, you can read any other footage. Every later chapter, from [white balance](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance) to [shot matching](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/shot-matching), relies on the scopes, so it is worth learning them first.

Video guide

## How to Read Video Scopes: Waveform, Parade and Vectorscope

Duration:  0:44 

Your browser can't play this video. [Download the MP4](https://colorgrade.video/media/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes/video.mp4) or read the[full transcript](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes).

Chapters

1. [ Play from  0:00 Waveform and vectorscope ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes#t=0)
2. [ Play from  0:08 A cast on the parade ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes#t=8)
3. [ Play from  0:19 Saturation and false colour ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes#t=19)
4. [ Play from  0:31 Clipping ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes#t=31)
5. [ Play from  0:42 Try it yourself ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes#t=42)

English captions [Watch page and full transcript ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-read-video-scopes) 

## Key takeaways

* The **Waveform** plots level (0-100%) against position across the frame: black at the bottom, white at the top.
* The **Parade** splits red, green and blue; on anything neutral the three traces should be the same height.
* The **Vectorscope** shows hue as an angle and saturation as distance from the centre; neutrals sit in the middle.
* The **Histogram** counts pixels at each level but forgets where they are in the frame.
* **False colour** and **Clipping** paint the same measurements onto the picture itself.

## In this chapter

1. [ 1. Why colourists trust scopes over their eyes ](#why-use-scopes)
2. [ 2. The waveform: level across the frame ](#waveform)
3. [ 3. The RGB parade: three waveforms side by side ](#rgb-parade)
4. [ 4. The vectorscope: hue and saturation ](#vectorscope)
5. [ 5. The histogram, and what legal range means ](#histogram-and-legal-range)
6. [ 6. False colour and clipping: scopes on the picture ](#false-colour-and-clipping)
7. [ 7. Reading a colour chart on the scopes ](#reading-a-colour-chart)
8. [ 8. Read the scopes on a test chart ](#try-it)

## Why colourists trust scopes over their eyes

Human vision is built to discount the colour of light. Stare at a warm shot for a minute and it starts to look neutral; switch to the next shot and that one looks blue. Colourists call this adaptation, and it is the main reason grades drift over a long session. Scopes don’t adapt, so they are the fixed reference you check your judgement against.

They also answer questions the eye can’t: is the white shirt clipped or just bright? Is the black really at black, or a dark grey that will look milky on a phone? Is the skin on the left of the frame the same hue as the skin on the right? Each scope is a different view of the same numbers; you glance between them and the picture, never grade from the scopes alone.

Try it in the studio

Switch to **Pro** and the **Scopes** column opens by default; the **Scopes** toggle in the top bar hides or shows it. Pick any two of **Waveform**, **Parade**, **Vectorscope** and **Histogram**. A good default pair is **Waveform** with **Vectorscope**: one for level, one for colour.

## The waveform: level across the frame

A waveform keeps the horizontal layout of the picture and throws away the vertical one. Each column of pixels in the frame becomes a column on the scope, and every pixel in that column is plotted at the height of its level. So a bright sky across the top of a shot and a bright shirt at the bottom both land near the top of the waveform, at their own left-to-right positions.

The scale runs from 0% (black) to 100% (white). A grey wedge, a strip of evenly spaced grey steps, appears as a staircase: the darkest step is a short line near 0%, the lightest one near 100%, and the steps between are evenly spaced if the camera and grade are behaving. That makes a wedge the quickest test of what a control really does: watch which steps move and which stay put.

[ ![The studio showing the test chart beside a luma waveform in which the 11-step grey wedge forms an even staircase from near 0 to near 100 percent.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/waveform-grey-wedge.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/waveform-grey-wedge.webp) 

The grey wedge as a staircase on the **Waveform** (**Luma**).

### Luma or RGB

The **Waveform** has a **Luma** / **RGB** toggle. **Luma** plots the weighted brightness of each pixel (Rec.709 luma, which counts green most and blue least), which is what you want for setting levels. **RGB** draws the red, green and blue traces on top of each other: where they coincide they add up to white, and where a channel separates you see a coloured fringe. A neutral wedge reads as a white staircase; a warm cast shows a red staircase sitting above a blue one.

### Rough landmarks

* Black: the deepest shadows touch 0-2%. Sitting at 8-10% looks lifted and flat.
* Mid grey: an 18% grey card lands at roughly 40-45%.
* Skin: usually between 40% and 70%, depending on complexion and light. There is no single correct number.
* White: diffuse whites such as paper or a shirt sit around 85-95%; only speculars and light sources need to reach 100%.

## The RGB parade: three waveforms side by side

The **Parade** is the waveform split into three: red on the left, green in the middle, blue on the right, each on the same 0-100% scale. It is the scope for colour balance, because comparing three heights side by side is far easier than untangling an overlay.

The rule is simple: on something neutral, the three traces should match. White paper, grey concrete, a grey wedge and black velvet all reflect red, green and blue equally, so if their traces don’t line up, the difference came from the light or the camera. How they differ tells you what kind of cast it is:

* Red higher than blue at the top, but equal at the bottom: a cast that scales with light, typical of tungsten light. **Temperature** or the **Gain** wheel fixes it.
* The same gap at every level: a cast added evenly, often from flare or a bad conversion. The **Offset** wheel fixes it.
* A gap only near the bottom: tinted blacks. The **Lift** wheel fixes it.

[ ![RGB parade of the ungraded test chart with the red, green and blue traces at matching heights over the grey wedge and neutral patches.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/parade-neutral-chart.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/parade-neutral-chart.webp) 

On a balanced shot, the three **Parade** traces match over neutral areas.

The [white balance chapter](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance) uses the parade to neutralise a tungsten cast, and the [colour wheels chapter](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/color-wheels) shows exactly which part of each trace each wheel moves.

## The vectorscope: hue and saturation

The **Vectorscope** ignores level altogether and plots colour on a circle. The angle of a point is its hue and its distance from the centre is its saturation. Anything neutral, from black through grey to white, sits on the centre dot, so a cast shows up as the whole cloud of points drifting off-centre in one direction.

The small boxes are the 75% colour-bar targets: where the red, magenta, blue, cyan, green and yellow bars of a standard 75% test signal land. They act as a compass for hue, and a rough limit for saturation: real-world colours rarely need to go past them, and strongly saturated colours beyond them are the ones that bleed and block after compression and fail broadcast checks.

__Where colours land on a standard vectorscope__
| Colour         | Position (clock face) | Opposite  |
| -------------- | --------------------- | --------- |
| Red            | Just left of 12       | Cyan      |
| Magenta        | About 1 to 2          | Green     |
| Blue           | Just below 3          | Yellow    |
| Cyan           | Between 5 and 6       | Red       |
| Green          | About 7 to 8          | Magenta   |
| Yellow         | Just above 9          | Blue      |
| Skin tone line | About 11              | Cyan-blue |

### The skin tone line

Human skin, from the palest to the deepest, has a remarkably similar hue: it differs mostly in level and saturation. On the vectorscope that hue falls along one line, between the red and yellow targets, which the studio draws as the skin tone line. If faces sit on or just around it, they read as natural; a face pulled towards green or magenta shows as a cluster off the line long before it looks obviously wrong. The [skin tones chapter](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones) builds on this.

[ ![Vectorscope of the test chart: the neutral patches form a dot at the centre, the coloured patches point towards their 75 percent targets, and the skin patches and faces lie along the skin tone line.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/vectorscope-chart.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/vectorscope-chart.webp) 

Hue as angle, saturation as distance: the chart on the **Vectorscope**.

## The histogram, and what legal range means

The **Histogram** counts how many pixels sit at each level, from black on the left to white on the right. It is good for one question, how the tones are distributed overall, and blind to another: where they are. A tall spike at the right edge means many pixels are clipped, but only the waveform or the **Clipping** view tells you whether that is the sky or a face. Use it as a quick summary, not a precise tool.

### Legal and broadcast range, briefly

In 8-bit Rec.709 video, black is stored as code 16 and white as code 235, not 0 and 255; the room left over is headroom. The waveform’s 0% and 100% correspond to those two codes. Broadcasters ask for programmes to stay within that range, allowing only a small margin either side, and limit how saturated colours may be. That is what “legal” or “broadcast safe” means.

For video bound for the web and phones, nobody checks legality, but the same limits still matter in practice: players clip anything outside 0-100%, so detail you leave there is lost. Keep the picture inside the scale and keep saturated colours within the 75% targets unless you have a reason not to. The [delivery chapter](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/delivery) covers export settings and ranges in more depth.

## False colour and clipping: scopes on the picture

Scopes tell you that something is at 100%; the **View** menu tells you where. **False colour** greys out the picture and paints specific level bands in colour, so you can read levels directly on the subject:

* Purple: crushed black, below 2.5%.
* Blue: near black.
* Green: 18% grey, 41-48%. Useful for placing a grey card or a mid-toned subject.
* Pink: one stop over grey, 60-66%, where light skin often sits.
* Yellow: near white, 97-99.5%.
* Red: clipped.

**Clipping** is stricter and colour-aware: red stripes mark pixels where a channel has reached 100%, blue where all channels are at 0, and yellow where one channel has crushed inside a colour. That last case matters for saturated reds and blues, which can lose a channel while their luma looks perfectly fine on the waveform.

[ ![The test chart in the False colour view: the middle steps of the grey wedge are green for mid grey, the lightest patches yellow, the deepest step purple, and the rest of the frame grey.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/false-colour-chart.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes/false-colour-chart.webp) 

**False colour** puts level bands on the picture: green is mid grey.

Why both

A flat line at the top of the waveform says “something is clipped”. **Clipping** says “it’s the lamp, not the face”, and that decides whether you need to act. Switch back to **Normal** before judging colour, since both views replace the picture.

## Reading a colour chart on the scopes

The demo footage, chart-scene, holds a 24-patch colour chart in the ColorChecker layout, an 11-step grey wedge, sky, grass, three faces and a red object. Ungraded, it shows you what correct looks like:

* The grey wedge draws an even staircase on the **Waveform**, and three identical staircases on the **Parade**.
* The chart’s bottom row of six neutral patches collapses to one tight dot at the centre of the **Vectorscope**.
* The chart’s red, green, blue, yellow, magenta and cyan patches point towards their targets, well inside them, as real surfaces do.
* The two skin patches and the three faces fall along the skin tone line, at different distances from the centre.

Now change one thing at a time and watch which scope responds. Raise **Temperature** and the parade splits while the vectorscope dot slides towards orange. Raise **Saturation** and the vectorscope grows outwards, but the waveform barely moves. Push **Whites** too far and the top of the waveform flattens while **Clipping** stripes the white patch red. A table of what to look for:

__Scope reading cheat sheet__
| What you see                                   | What it means       | Where to fix it               |
| ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------------------- |
| Flat line at 100% on the waveform              | Clipped whites      | Whites, Highlights, Gain      |
| Trace bottom well above 0%                     | Lifted, flat blacks | Blacks, Lift                  |
| Parade traces at different heights on neutrals | Colour cast         | Pick white, Temperature, Tint |
| Vectorscope cloud off-centre                   | Overall cast        | Offset, Temperature           |
| Faces off the skin tone line                   | Skin hue wrong      | Secondary on skin             |
| Colours past the 75% targets                   | Over-saturated      | Saturation, Hue vs Sat        |

With that vocabulary, the next chapter, [contrast and tonal range](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/contrast-and-tonal-range), uses the waveform and false colour to set black, white and mid grey on a flat version of the same chart. If you only need a quick fix rather than the theory, [correct the colour of a video](https://colorgrade.video/color-correct-video) with **Auto colour** and check the result on the scopes afterwards.

## Read the scopes on a test chart

Open a clip with a grey or white reference, show the waveform and vectorscope, and watch how each control moves them.

1. 1  
### Open a clip and switch to Pro
Choose **Open video or photo**, then switch the top bar to **Pro** so the **Scopes** column appears.
2. 2  
### Show level and colour
Pick **Waveform** and **Vectorscope**. Find the neutral areas: a staircase or flat band on the waveform, a dot at the centre of the vectorscope.
3. 3  
### Check balance on the parade
Swap **Waveform** for **Parade** and compare the red, green and blue traces over something neutral. They should be the same height.
4. 4  
### Move one control and watch
In **Adjust**, raise **Temperature** and then **Saturation**, one at a time, and note which scope responds to each. Double-click a slider to reset it.
5. 5  
### Check the extremes on the picture
Open the **View** menu and choose **False colour**, then **Clipping**, to see where the darkest and lightest areas sit. Return to **Normal** before judging colour.

## Video scopes: questions

### How do you read a waveform in video?

Left to right on the waveform matches left to right in the frame, and height is level from 0% (black) to 100% (white). A face on the right of the shot appears as a cluster on the right of the scope at its level. Use it to set black and white points and to check that nothing important is clipped.

### What does a vectorscope show?

Hue and saturation, without level. The angle around the circle is the hue and the distance from the centre is the saturation, so neutral greys sit in the middle and vivid colours reach towards the target boxes. A whole cloud shifted off-centre means a colour cast.

### What is the skin tone line on a vectorscope?

A line between the red and yellow targets, at about 11 o’clock, along which almost all human skin falls regardless of complexion. Skin differs mostly in level and saturation, not hue, so faces that sit near the line read as natural and faces pulled off it look green, magenta or orange.

### What is the difference between a waveform and a histogram?

Both show levels, but the waveform keeps the horizontal position of each pixel, so you can tell which part of the frame is clipped or crushed. The histogram only counts how many pixels sit at each level. It is a quick summary of distribution, while the waveform is the tool for actually setting levels.

### What is the RGB parade used for?

Colour balance. It shows the red, green and blue channels as three waveforms side by side, and on anything neutral they should be the same height. Where they differ, and whether the gap is at the top, the bottom or everywhere, tells you which control will fix the cast.

### What does legal range mean in video?

In 8-bit Rec.709 video, black is code 16 and white is code 235, which the waveform shows as 0% and 100%. Broadcasters require levels and saturation to stay within limits around that range. For web video, players clip anything outside it, so keeping inside 0-100% protects your detail.

[ ← Start Color grading tutorial ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial) [ Next: chapter 2 → Contrast and tonal range ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/contrast-and-tonal-range) 

## Keep going

* [ Contrast and tonal range Set black and white points, place mid grey, and shape contrast without clipping either end, using the waveform and false colour. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/contrast-and-tonal-range)
* [ White balance Why casts happen, how Temperature and Tint work, how to neutralise a shot on the parade, and how to add warmth on purpose. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance)
* [ Colour wheels What each colour wheel does in plain maths, how the master ring and puck differ, when to use log wheels, and what the primary bars add. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/color-wheels)
* [ What is color grading? Grading vs correction, the order of work, and the tools explained. ](https://colorgrade.video/what-is-color-grading)
* [ Color correct a video online Neutral, accurate colour from one button, with scopes and sliders to refine it. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-correct-video)

All 13 chapters 
1. [ 1\. Video scopes ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes)  · Basics
2. [ 2\. Contrast and tonal range ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/contrast-and-tonal-range)  · Basics
3. [ 3\. White balance ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance)  · Basics
4. [ 4\. Colour wheels ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/color-wheels)  · Intermediate
5. [ 5\. Curves ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/curves)  · Intermediate
6. [ 6\. Secondary correction ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/secondary-color-correction)  · Intermediate
7. [ 7\. Skin tones ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones)  · Intermediate
8. [ 8\. Log footage and LUTs ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/log-footage-and-luts)  · Advanced
9. [ 9\. Creative looks ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/creative-looks)  · Advanced
10. [ 10\. Shot matching ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/shot-matching)  · Advanced
11. [ 11\. Delivery and export ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/delivery)  · Advanced
12. [ 12\. Grading workflow ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/workflow)  · Intermediate
13. [ 13\. Common mistakes ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/mistakes)  · Basics