P: RGB Parade and Vectorscope in Lightroom?

Professional photographers tend to use histograms and are satisfied with them, and do not even understand what vectorscope does. Video people prefer vectorscopes.

By @F1XX 

It’s not just a simple preference. For many years I have primarily been involved in photography and print, where everybody got trained on the histogram and nobody knows what a vectorscope is. 

But when I started getting into video, my eyes were opened to waveforms and vectorscopes, and now it’s easy for me to list the ways they’re objectively better than the histogram. So, despite having worked with histograms for around 30 years, I now think histograms are the weakest of these tools. Histograms provide you with the least amount of useful information about image tonality, compared to waveforms and vectorscopes. And I say that as someone who still does mostly photography and print. The feature of the Lightroom/Photoshop histogram I actually use the most is the clipping display, because the histogram graph can’t tell you anything about where in the actual image that tones are high, low, or clipping. But a waveform does, because it has a spatial component that the histogram has no match for.

If more photographers understood the vectorscope, the more they would become dissatisfied with the histogram. The job of portrait photographers in particular would be simplified by the vectorscope’s much simpler and more direct identification of correct flesh tones. But if they’ve only used traditional photo apps and haven’t been trained on video, they just have no idea what they’re missing.

ofcourse professionals want to professionaly know if their colors are correct. 
I do video and photo and I do miss the accuracy of scopes. 
It is so, so easy for adobe to implement it, they just don't care. Could even allow it to be disabled by default and just toggle in on through the settings.. implementation is such a low cost for them.. 

What professional photographers are not aware of is that vectorscopes and histograms provide entirely different information. The histogram serves the function of a waveform monitorin video in what referred to as the parade mode (red, green, blue displayed separately). The colored hump of the waveform monitor (below left) shows the range of light and dark for each color channel, scanning the frame from left to right. A lot of videographers prefer just to see luminance information, which can be represented by a single hump on the scope. Now, note the line on the vectorscope (below right) at about 11 o'clock. That's the all-important "flesh vector". That is the color of human flesh (all ethnicities). The image I used for this is a head shot, so there are not a lot of other prominent colors in the image. The vectorscope provides other information, like if the blacks (the glob in the very center of the scope) have a color shift that may affect the balance of the rest of the image. 

If there is a professional photographer out there who can tell me how to find a correct flesh tone in a histogram, I would be most grateful. Otherwise, I would say that we are talking about two completely different measuring tools here.

Ric

 Do you think many "professionals" would use this to adjust their pictures?

Professional photographers tend to use histograms and are satisfied with them, and do not even understand what vectorscope does. Video people prefer vectorscopes. 

Yes, a vectorscope with skin tone line a 10000%! Need it so badly!

Topic: Vectorscope

Just posting as a request for vector scope in lightroom classic

Darktable, 3dlut creator, rawcolor app have vectorscope. acr/lr for quick editing processes.

@ivan25349743g7a0 

This is what a vectorscope looks like. The pattern shows how it looks with SMPTE color bars as a source. The dots in the little boxes on the graticule (face markings) represent where those colors should be. We shoot a very accurate color bar chart to set up and match the colors coming from multiple studio cameras.

You'll notice a vector running to a position that is about 10 o'clock opposite the -I vector. We sometimes call this the flesh vector. Regardless of a subject's skin color, it should always line up with this vector. It will, if everything else is set right, but most camera shaders (the person who does the camera matching) will put sombody in front of the cameras, get a close up, and use this vector to make sure the vector matches on all the cameras. A good shader (or editor, for that matter) will never totally trust what they see on a monitor no matter how good and well-calibrated it is. The scopes always rule. 

I hope this helps clear things up.

(Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons, Denelson83)

(Edited to fix embarassing typos 2.1.24)