Light

The Light section corrects how bright a clip is and how warm it looks, then shapes its tones. It’s usually where a grade starts.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Color ▸ Light
Agent tools: set_videoset_action_end

The Light section

Select the clip and open the Color sub-tab.
Open the Light section by clicking its header, if it isn’t open already.
Drag a slider, or type in the number field beside it.

All nine controls start at 0, and each shows two decimals. The rows run in the order they act on the picture, so working down the list is a natural way to correct a clip.

Control	Range	What it does
Exposure	−3 to +3 EV	Brightens or darkens in stops
Temperature	−1 to +1	Warmer or cooler
Tint	−1 to +1	Toward magenta or green
Highlights	−1 to +1	Lifts or lowers the brighter half of the tones
Shadows	−1 to +1	Lifts or lowers the darker half of the tones
Whites	−1 to +1	Stretches the tones toward white, with black held
Blacks	−1 to +1	Raises or deepens the dark end, with white held
Vibrance	−1 to +1	Changes saturation mostly in colours that have little of it
Fade	0 to 1	Lifts black and lowers white, for a washed-out film look

Reset in the header sets all nine back to 0 as one undo step, Undo Light, and leaves the Color section alone. The header reads “neutral” or “adjusted”.

With an action selected, every control here sets the value the action animates to, rather than the clip’s own value.

Set the exposure

Exposure brightens or darkens the picture in stops, from −3 to +3 EV. +1 doubles the light and −1 halves it.

It works on linear light, meaning the amount of light in the scene rather than the encoded picture values, the way a camera’s exposure does. So black stays black. To lift every level by the same amount, black included, use Brightness.

To judge exposure by measurement rather than by eye, watch the waveform as you drag.

Set the white balance

Temperature and Tint work on linear light, like Exposure. Both run from −1 to +1.

Control	Positive	Negative	At the limit
Temperature	Warmer: more red, less blue	Cooler: more blue, less red	At +1 red rises and blue falls by 0.3 of a stop. −1 is the reverse.
Tint	Toward magenta	Toward green	At +1 green falls by 0.3 of a stop, which reads as magenta. −1 raises it.

There’s no white-balance eyedropper, and no automatic colour balance or shot matching. To balance by measurement, read something neutral on the Parade and move these two until the channels line up.

Lift or lower the highlights and shadows

Highlights moves the brighter half of the tones and Shadows the darker half. Both run from −1 to +1, and neither touches the other’s half.

At ±1 each moves its tones by up to a quarter of the full range. The move is strongest at the extreme, white for Highlights and black for Shadows, and fades to nothing at the middle of the tonal range.

Set the white and black points

Whites stretches the tones toward white and holds black where it is. Blacks does the same at the other end: positive raises the dark end, negative deepens it, and white is held. Both run from −1 to +1.

Each is a stretch of up to 15 %.

Add colour with Vibrance

Vibrance changes saturation mostly in colours that have little of it, from −1 to +1. Colours that are already strong are left mostly alone, which is the difference from Saturation, which moves every colour alike.

At +1 a nearly grey colour gets about twice its saturation, and at −1 it goes grey. A fully saturated colour doesn’t change at either end.

Fade the picture

Fade lifts black and lowers white for a washed-out film look. It runs from 0 to 1 and has no negative side. At 1, black rises to 10 % and white falls to 95 %.

With an agent

One set_video call can set any of the nine Light controls and the four Color controls together, in its color object, and it leaves the ones it doesn’t name alone. Each key is its control’s name in lower case, such as exposure or fade, and 0 means no change. A positive temperature is warmer and a positive tint is more magenta. set_action_end takes the same keys for an action.

A set_video call with a value outside a Light control’s range fails, rather than being pulled back to the limit as a typed number is. set_action_end does take such a value, and the action stops at the limit when it’s drawn. See Tools: picture and grade.

Good to know

A number you type outside a control’s range is pulled back to the nearest limit.
Light acts after the Color section’s four controls, even though the tab lists it first. See The fixed grade order.
On an adjustment clip, Light grades everything behind the clip.
In an HDR project, Exposure works on the scene’s light as HLG encodes it, so +1 still doubles the light.