Using exposure assist

Exposure Assist is a tool to judge the exposure of a log encoded signal. By activating exposure assist in Livegrade, certain luminance ranges of an image will be coloured in order to show how certain parts of the image are exposed.

Exposure assist

Setup exposure assist#

Exposure assist colors a black and white version of the current image by applying an 1D LUT, which can be selected for the entire app as default and for each slot individually.

To set the default exposure assist LUT for the entire app, open Livegrade’s settings (Livegrade > [Settings…]) and open the Grading tab.

There you can chose the LUT which should be applied when pressing Exposure Assist

Exposure assist settings

If you are working with a mixed camera setup, you can setup exposure assist for each slot individually.

To do so, open the slot settings tab in the slot panel and change the exposure assist LUT to Custom

Then, select the custom exposure assist LUT for the current slot.

Slot Settings Exposure Assist

Exposure assist for mixed cameras

Example:

• You are shooting mainly with LogC3 cameras with EI 800 and want to use False Color
• Set your exposure assist LUT in your grading settings to [ ARRI LogC3 EI 800 (False Color) ]
• One of your cameras is an Alexa 35 with *LogC4 *at EI 800
• Select the slot of the Alexa 35, select Custom within the exposure assist settings of your slot and select the LUT to [ ARRI LogC3 EI 800 (False Color) ]

False Color, EL Zone and Black and White#

There are three approaches of using exposure assist:

False Color#

Colorizes luminance values according to the false color specifications of the individual camera manufacturer. The ranges and the colours correspond to the false color mode in the respective camera.

False Color

EL Zone#

Colorizes luminance values of full stop increments above and below 18% grey and aligns with the language of a DP’s spot meter.

The scale in which exposure level is displayed in which color is predefined by the EL Zone system, which was invented by cinematographer Ed Lachman.

EL Zone

Important: “False Color” and “EL Zone” approaches have one thing in common: the underlying log format is crucial to analyze the original signal. Always make sure, that you choose the exposure assist LUT which corresponds to your chosen log format.

Black and white#

Creates a black and white representation of the image and allows to focus on the luminance of the image, excluding all colors from the image.

Customize exposure assist#

You can also customize your exposure assist tool by loading your own user LUTs to Livegrade.

To do so, create a custom LUT using our False Color LUT Creator and download it to your computer.

Then, select User LUTs > Show in Finder in the exposure assist LUT selector to open the user LUTs folder.

Copy the downloaded user LUT into that folder and select it as LUT in the exposure assist LUT selector.

Exposure Assist User LUTs

Enable exposure assist#

Exposure assist can be enabled via

• the toolbar to enable it for all slots at once
• the slot’s preview to enable it for one input slot
• the output’s settings to enable it for all sources shown in the output