How to Color Grade in Adobe Premiere Pro.How do you do color grading in Premiere Pro?.
Color is an important part of any video as it can attract viewers and your audience. The creative use of color is also a classic storytelling technique, as certain emotional responses can be elicited through color. Therefore, it is important to make sure that you intentionally use color effects in your video projects.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC has many color grading tools. They allow you to adjust black and white colors, shades, brightness and more. In this article, you will learn what these tools are, what they are for, and how to use them for color correction when editing video.
Using Lumetri Color
For color grading in Premiere, you need to familiarize yourself with the Lumetri Color panel. You can find this by selecting the Color workspace at the top of Premiere. This panel has several different functions that you can use to change the appearance of the color in the selected clip or clips.
Basic Adjustment
This feature allows you to make basic general changes to the color of your video clip. The changes you can change include white balance, hue and saturation. Here you can also import LUTs, which are pre-made color grading settings that you can download and use in your project. This is a good way to fix basic settings like skin tone.
Creative
From the Creative drop-down list, you can select a view or upload one. These are simple ways to give your clip a certain look without having to go through all the settings. Technically they are also LUTs, but they change the look more, whereas the LUTs themselves tend to be more of a simple color correction.
You can also change settings under Settings, such as faded film, sharpness, brightness, and saturation. You can also change the shades of shadows and highlights here.
Curves
These settings may seem a bit intimidating with graphs at first, but once you start using curves, you’ll quickly understand what they do. Curves are great for detailed editing and giving your video clip the look you want.
Typically, you will adjust the shadows in the bottom left corner of the chart, the midtones in the middle, and the highlights in the top right corner. Making subtle changes can be more difficult if you’re using curves for the first time, so try making big changes with curves so you can see how much of your clip is changing.
Color circles and matching
Here you can change the tint of the shadows, midtones, and highlights, as well as the intensity of these tints. You can also use color matching to match these settings with other clips in the timeline.
To do this, first select the clip you want to use as the color reference. Then select another clip in the timeline to match the reference clip and click Apply Match.
Secondary HSL
This function can be used after performing basic color correction. This allows you to correct a specific color, rather than the image as a whole. First, you can select a color using the Eyedropper Tool or by selecting a color channel. You can then adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness using the sliders.
You can then also remove the noise or blur and use the color wheel to correct the selected color.
Vignette
If you want to add a vignette as a video effect, there are options here to do so, and you can change settings such as amount, middle, roundness, and feathering.
Using the Lumetri Scopes
Another color grading tool you need to learn how to use in Adobe Premiere is Lumetri Scopes. These are waveform graphs that show you the exact brightness levels in your video clips. Several different scopes can be used in Premiere, but Parade and Vecterscope are the main ones.
The Parade oscilloscope lets you see red, green, and blue traces in a video image side by side so you can easily compare them. 0 on the graph means black and goes up to 100, that is, completely white.
As you make changes to colors with Lumetri’s tools, you’ll be able to see these waveforms change according to the changes you’ve made. The more you use this feature, the easier it will be to look at the graph and understand how it translates into your image.
Another important scope to be aware of is the Vectorscope. This is a circular area that shows which parts of the color wheel the video image you select falls on. It also shows the saturation level of your video. Brighter colors will fall further from the center of the wheel, and black and white images will be dead center.
Tutorial for Importing and Using LUTs
LUTs are an easy way to make a general base color adjustment or adjustment to your project without messing with the Lumetri Color settings yourself. In order to use LUTs, you first need to find them to download online. You can find both free and premium LUTs, the choice is yours. Just be sure to download them from a trusted source.
Once the LUTs are loaded, follow these steps to use them in Premiere:
1. Select Lumetri Color > Base Correction > Input LUT.
2. Click the drop-down menu and select Browse.
3. In Explorer, find the LUT you want to use and select it. It will then be applied to your clip.
The LUT can be used as a starting point for further color grading and color grading. Simply adding a LUT to your clips and stopping there can make your color inconsistent, as the LUT won’t look the same on every clip depending on the source lighting and clips color. So, after adding a LUT, you’ll want to go through your clips and fix the color so there aren’t any inconsistencies.
When Should You Color Grade?
You might be wondering at what point in the video editing process you should start thinking about color grading. In truth, you can start at any point during editing, but from a workflow standpoint, it’s best to color correct only after all of your clips have been edited and set in stone.
This is especially true if you’re editing LOG footage, or the desaturated, neutral footage that many professional cameras shoot. It will require a lot more color grading work to achieve the finished look, and you don’t have to take huge steps back if you need to change things like the order or length of the clip.
So, make sure your footage is fully edited the way you want before you start coloring. This should be one of the very last steps in your editing workflow.
Color Grading in Adobe Premiere For a Better Video
Premiere is one of the best programs you can use to color correct your footage as it has a wide range of tools for this purpose. Whether you just need basic editing or you want to give your video a creative look, the tools above will help you achieve that in your own video production.