As a photographer in 2025, you almost have to do a bit of video work on the side as well. So, whether you use it to market yourself or offer video as a product to clients, this will force you to use a video editor and learn how to interact with video-specific tools. And that’s why I learned some DaVinci Resolve for my YouTube channel. I was immediately overwhelmed by the sea of new tools, and I slowly learned how to use them, but now I can’t imagine my photography without some of them. So, here are 3 Videography tools I now use as a Photographer, and how they pushed my craft to the next level.
But first, let me introduce myself and my photography. Hi, I’m Vlad. For the last decade or so, I’ve specialized in photographing people. I am a photography enthusiast, and my current focus is on creating photos that resemble stills from a movie or images shot on film. I also run a YouTube channel and a Blog where I delve into photography and editing workflow-related topics, such as how to emulate film grain realistically, modify the code of your presets to get more out of them, or recreate the look of film using only the curves panel.
1. Vectorscope
The vectorscope is a tool we see in every video editor. This tool visually maps out the hue and saturation of every pixel in your photo, the same way a histogram maps out our exposure. It looks like a circular chart, with boxes for the exact position of the main colors around the wheel, and it also has a super neat line for the skin tones that, as a portrait photographer, I find invaluable. The closer a color’s dot is to the edge of the circle, the more saturated it is. In short, it turns subjective color into an exact science and eliminates the guesswork when color grading my photos.
At first, as a portrait photographer, my primary goal was dialing in perfect skin tones and trying to eliminate weird color casts. This way, I checked that my subject’s skin tone looked consistent and natural-looking, regardless of the lighting situation. Using a vectorscope’s skin tone line made it easy to avoid skin that appears unhealthy, flushed, or artificially colored. But, later on, I also figured out that the vectorscope is incredibly useful for correcting the white balance, or getting your colors in line after applying a heavy color grade.
Creating pleasing color palettes in my images also became much easier. When I’m aiming for complementary colors, I can watch the vectorscope in real time while adjusting the HSL sliders and deliberately push hues toward opposite sides of the scope. That makes it easy to fine-tune the relationship between colors, maximize contrast, and keep everything balanced, instead of guessing by eye. The result is cleaner color separation and more intentional color contrast that still feels controlled and natural.
The only problem is that Lightroom and most of our other photo editing software don’t have a vectorscope built in. So, to get a vectorscope reading for my photos, I have to use a third-party tool. This usually works by sampling a selected area on my screen, which is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it lets me isolate a specific area, like a face, to adjust skin tones in a photo full of warm tones. But on the other hand, it means I have to resize the sampling area every time I crop or zoom, and I can’t get a reading of the entire photo when I’m zoomed in too far. The one I’m using is called Scopes 3, and I bought it for around $15, which is a steal. I know there are more expensive alternatives out there, like the Nobel Omni Scopes, which seem to have more options, but this one also comes with a premium price tag of around 100$.
2. Color Checkers and Grey Cards
In the video world, matching colors between shots is critical; so these tools are non-negotiable, but since most of us, photographers, don’t shoot with multiple cameras, tools like the greycard and color checkers are usually dismissed. But after trying them firsthand this summer, I wouldn’t go back.
I know that White Balance seems like a solved problem. We all shoot RAW, and we can tweak the temperature and tint sliders until things look right. But is that enough? I would say NO! There’s way more to white balance than it might seem at first glance. We can get it roughly in the right spot by eye, but accounting for all the subtle colors that are picked up by the light as it reflects off objects around us is almost impossible. Our eyes and brains compensate in real-time, but our cameras record the raw, often unflattering truth of mixed lighting. That’s where color checkers and grey cards come into play.
But first of all, I want to point out how awful the idea of using the eyedropper on some random grey object in the scene or a person’s sclera is. This is far from enough for a neutral starting point, even for simple outdoor portraits! Sunlight is roughly around 5500K, but shade is usually much cooler at around 6000-6500k. So if you do your white balance on a shaded part of a grey garment or some asphalt, Lightroom will try to neutralize those colder tones, and the final image will often drift in the opposite direction, typically looking too warm overall. And also, if you pick a very bright spot with your color picker, you can make your highlights look too clinical, and the resulting photo will not look cinematic at all. Those random surfaces are not reliable neutral references under mixed or indirect light, and that’s why I started using Grey cards.
And then there is the problem of reflectivity. Here, a portrait in the forest is the perfect example. Sunlight is fairly neutral, but green foliage absorbs most of the red and blue wavelengths and reflects green. That reflected green light becomes secondary illumination, and the light bounced off the leaves will then spill onto your subject’s face, clothes, and shadows. This will influence the tint of the final image and has the potential to make skin tones look muddy and skicly, and it’s super annoying to deal with while editing without a neutral reference point in frame.
Moreover, I would say Color Checkers are even better if you want to avoid weird color casts in your photos when photographing in environments with imperfect LED lights, as many consumer LEDs have strong spectral gaps and color casts that are hard to perceive using our eyes, but a nightmare to compensate for in post-production. And this problem gets accentuated when we have to deal with colored light, as it already has parts of the color spectrum missing. When that light hits an object, the object can only reflect the wavelengths that are actually present in the light. So if a surface relies on wavelengths that the light does not contain, it simply cannot reflect them, so the color appears darker, duller, or less saturated. A Color Checker gives you a reliable color reference in the scene, making it far easier to neutralize those casts and restore accurate, consistent colors in post, instead of fighting sliders and curves blindly.
The only caveat is that I prefer using a color checker designed for video rather than the classic 24-patch photography chart. It pairs exceptionally well with the vectorscope because it includes two patches for each of the six primary vectorscope colors. That lets me quickly identify any hue that’s drifting off and compensate using the HSL sliders until the vectorscope forms a clean, symmetrical hexagon with he middle point in the center of the vectorscope. As a bonus, there’s a neutral gray patch in the center, which makes dialing in white balance fast and reliable.
3. False Color
False Color is another powerful monitoring tool, but this one is for exposure. By mapping different brightness levels to distinct colors, it creates a “heat map” on your image, allowing you to instantly see exactly where highlights are clipping, shadows are being crushed, and, most importantly for cinematic photos, where skintones fall on the exposure scale. Unlike a standard histogram, which only shows the quantity of tones, false color provides spatial accuracy, revealing how these tones are distributed in your photos and how they affect composition. This, combined with local masking in Lightroom, helps me get better exposure and more depth in my photos, while making sure there is just the right amount of contrast between my subject and the background.
For my cinematic portraits, this tool became invaluable once I started using contrast ratios. I use it to dial in exposure before adding any creative grading, and I also use false color to control the contrast between the lit side and the shadow side of the face. I usually place skin tones slightly above middle gray, which on my false color scale shows up as neutral gray or a subtle pink. From there, I make sure neither highlights nor shadows on the face drift too far away. This keeps skin looking natural, bright, and healthy, and ensures that any split-toning I apply later on doesn’t push it into unnatural/unhealthy territory. This way, my final image can be bold and punchy and saturated while the skin still feels real and natural.
Beyond skin tones, false color enhanced my editing workflow by giving me an objective readout of my photos’ tonal structure. Helps me be super precise with masking when I try to fix exposure problems or just simply the tones in my images. This tool transformed my editing from subjective guessing into a technical, repeatable process, allowing me as a photographer to build images with deliberate tonal depth and cinematic feel. I can say that FALSE COLOR generally made me understand what type of lighting I prefer in my photos and improved my compositions.
To get false color in Lightroom, you can use the workaround that I described in my other article. This is a method I developed that creates a custom camera profile we can use to monitor our photos in Lightroom. This is done by mapping exposure values in DaVinci Resolve, exporting that look into a 3DLUT, and baking that LUT into a camera profile using Adobe Photoshop. This profile then applies the color scale to your images directly in Lightroom, making exposure analysis easier and more intuitive than relying solely on histograms. For the complete, step-by-step technical guide on how to build the color mapping in Resolve and bake it into a profile for Lightroom, you can read more about it in my full article on https://vmoldo.com/false-color/
To wrap things up, these three tools do more than streamline my photo and video workflow; they fundamentally changed how I understand and control light and color. The Color Checker gives me a solid baseline of accuracy, the Vectorscope provides objective feedback for every color decision I make, and False Color removes the guesswork from exposure entirely. And by integrating these videography staples into my photography workflow, I’m not just adding new tools; I’m adopting a more reliable, confident, and scientific approach to my craft, from setting up the shot to the final export. Overall, they pushed my photography to a new level and made my work more precise and easier.
