Premiere Pro Advanced Colour Correction Tutorial

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting filmmaking tutorial color correction and color grading are very important if you want your videos to come out looking professional unfortunately chances are that your computer monitor is lying to you and make new video look more blue or more purple or darker or brighter than it actually is how do you know if your video is actually properly color corrected and graded fortunately Adobe Premiere Pro comes with some pretty advanced tools for analyzing the color information in your video and in this tutorial I want to show you how you can use these tools to make your video look a whole lot better a fundamental challenge for color correction and color grading is that if you are creating videos for YouTube like me people will watch your content on many different devices and each device has its own unique display that will represent colors in its own unique way the very same video may look a little bit too blue for one person and a little bit too purple for another and that is something you have absolutely no control over however you can use some of the advanced tools built into Adobe Premiere Pro like the vectorscope and the waveform monitors to analyze the color information in your video and use that information to color correct and calibrate your film project with much more accuracy while this doesn't guarantee that it will look perfect for everyone if you at least get the colors in your video correct from a technical standpoint it will likely look much better for almost anyone who watches it this is going to be an intermediate tutorial and not only will I assume that you know how to use Premiere Pro I will also assume that you have watched my basic tutorials on color correction and color grading in this video we will look at these concepts from a much more technical point of view but now since the video isn't going to correct and grade itself let's jump right into the tutorial welcome to Adobe Premiere Pro and some fun times not only looking at but also understanding the cow of your video the very first clip we will have a look at is this coastal shot that I took on Phillip Island down here in Australia it is a pretty nice shot already but let's have a look at the actual color information in this video so we can make it look even better now I am using Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 and over the years they've changed the tools and some of the effects that you can use to analyze and work with color however even if you're using an older version or a different piece of software you should pretty much have the same tools and the same effects available to analyze and work with color the very first tool we will have a look at is the waveform monitor if you are using an older version of Premiere Pro you will have to come up into the window menu and open up a reference monitor a reference monitor is basically the same view as your main display but it's a secondary view that you can position somewhere else let's pull it to the side and in your reference monitor you can actually right click go down to display mode and well I don't have the options available anymore because I'm a newer version of Premiere Pro and they've moved the options but down in here you should have options for waveform monitor RGB parade as well as a vector scope when Premiere Pro CC I believe 2013 came out they implemented the new metric color engine into Premiere Pro the new metric engine is actually what usually runs in speed grade and so they've changed all of the tools to work with color in Premiere Pro and you can now find these tools under window and then you'll have to do metric color and the one we're going to use Lemaitre scopes now these scopes may look all technical and scary but they're actually really easy to understand and once you understand them it is so much easier to manage the color image and really make your video a pop now the first tool i want to look at because it usually is the first one i use is the waveform monitor so I am going to temporarily disable my vector scope as well as my RGB parade and just concentrate on the waveform monitor the waveform monitor shows you the brightness in your image and the left side of the monitor represents the left side of your image and the right side of the monitor represents the right side of your image so this is really left to right the exact same as your video the waveform monitor is a scale and it goes from 0 up to a hundred while a little bit beyond but we'd only care about a hundred a hundred representing absolute white and zero representing absolute black and watch this waveform monitor as I scrub through my video can you see it shifting a little bit and it's obviously picking up its live updating with my preview window and what I can see is there are a few spots here in the image that are absolute white and if I look over here that's actually these waves these waves here are absolute white if I were to color pick these values its absolute white so it clips at a hundred which is the maximum value over here there's a little bit of brightness with some of the foam over the waves which is these little blotches here and then towards the left it gets a little bit darker because we don't really have much brightness on the left side of the image the other thing I can see as well is that this solid block here of bright pixels is actually my sky so this is actually a fairly bright sky but it's not maxed out it's just fairly bright so it spans across and then all of this years the land as well as the ocean the wave for monitor is really great at showing you whether your image is properly exposed ideally you would want the image to contain colors from the entire spectrum from 0 all the way to 100 so you know you've got the full dynamic range to work with I can see however that my image doesn't really go all the way up to black there's a little bit of a gap here at the bottom so my image is actually lacking a little bit of contrast and we can easily add that back let me make this a little bit smaller and push it off to the side so we can see what we're doing now I am going to come into effects and I am going to search for a curves effect there are other color correction effects that you can obviously use the reason I like to use curves is for one I really like using curves but also this is a really universal effect and you'll find it in any editing software that you may be using so let's apply a curves effect to our Phillip Island clip and let's come down into the curves so these are the RGB curves and it has four curves one is the master which will affect all channels so this is really the luma the brightness so I can change the entire brightness of the image and I can separately manage the red green and blue color channels in my in right now I only care about the brightness because I just want to fix up the exposure of this image and if you've never worked with curves before the concept is actually pretty easy every curve essentially has two axes the x-axis is the input value and the y-axis is the output value so it Maps an input color to an output color or in the case of the master curve or the luma curve it's an input brightness to an output brightness in order to bring the darker pixels in my image a bit closer towards black to increase the contrast what I have to do is I have to come into my curves take the bottom left corner of the luma curve and push it over towards the right side keep an eye out on the waveform monitor and see how the bottom pixels are being pushed downwards obviously I don't if I go too far obviously everything starts getting clipped and you get some total black errors in the image which is not what I want I just want to push it down a little bit so it's kind of touching black maybe a few black pixels is not a bad thing and what has happened now if you have a look on this image itself let's push that down just a little I've added a little bit of contrast so if I turn my curves off it's a little bit flat turn them on the contrast is improved the other thing is while I do have some waves that are already clipping the rest of the image doesn't really max out very much it doesn't go very bright so it looks like a little bit of a greyish day and I do want to push the upper color upwards a little bit more just to again increase the contrast so again going to come into my curves effect this time I'm going to take the top right corner of my curve and pull that over to the left side a little bit and again keep an eye on the luma curve can you see how the highlights the top range of my pixels is being pushed upwards a little bit so again it's going to push this not all the way because obviously I'm getting a little bit of clipping here but I'm ok with that that's just the tip of the waves it's going to push it up a little bit towards the left side and now let's push it out of the way if I turn my curves on and off have a look at the image so this is before and this is after so I've just added a lot of contrast into the image and this looks a little bit richer to me this is usually the very first thing I do just to get the exposure of the image correct also do note that if you find yourself having to make very very large changes on the luma have a really flat image and you push all the dogs really dark and the bride's really bright you are only increasing the luminance you're not increasing the saturation and sometimes your final image may have a lot more contrast but it may feel a little bit desaturated so one thing I tend to do I like to search for you know you can use a hue and saturation effect or whatever in Premiere Pro I like to use the fast color corrector so let's apply a fast color corrector to this clip as well come down let's just push up the saturation maybe to 110 I don't want to overdo it I just want to add a little bit so that in my final image all I've really done I've had a little bit of contrast and I've added a little bit of extra color to me this is a much more appealing image also just a note right now we are just doing color Corrections we're just fixing the color we're not color grading which is then styling it and adding a mood into the image ideally you would always want to color correct your footage first to get it to the ideal point and then you add the color grading where you then play with the mood and you tinted and do all sorts of artistic effects at least that's how it works best for me now that we've learned how to use the waveform monitor to fix the exposure of our image let's start looking at color here I have a small clip of water doing a horrendous job of trying to take a stable photo of Fuji Sun and if you look at the color it's a little bit magenta ish pink ish it's something isn't quite right with this before we start fixing up the color however I'm going to quickly check my waveform monitor to make sure the image is properly exposed and I would say that actually looks pretty good so we've got some highlights here which is the screen and the shirt is pretty wide as well on that side and then there's some black here and the seed the pans the keyboard and this actually looks pretty good let's look at the tools that we have available to analyze and work with the color in our image for that I'm going to bring up the vector scope as well as the RGB parade and I'm going to hide the waveform monitor let me make this a little bit bigger and let's look at the RGB parade first the RGB parade is actually very similar to the waveform monitor in that it shows you the image left to right except the chose to the image three times once for each channel on the left side you have the red channel of the image again left to ride is left to right in the image then the green channel left to right and the blue left to right as it matches in the image you can see right off the bat that the red channel the red tones in this image are a little bit stronger than blue and then followed by the green channel so this kind of tells you that most of the colors seem to be sitting in that red magenta area and we can look into the vectorscope to see how the colors in our entire image are distributed within this spectrum the vectorscope is essentially a color wheel so it's got red green blue yellow cyan and magenta and it shows you in like a little point cloud which color the pixels in your image are and you can see that a lot of the pixels are kind of up here in this little quadrant which is kind of red magenta ish so there's a big blob here pushed a little bit in that directions there's very little green and just a little bit of yellow in the image and a little blue but you can see there's definitely a little bit of a red and magenta tint going on in this image now before we go any further let me quickly show you something cool and maybe you'll trigger an aha moment with you just like I did for me let me quickly apply a fast color corrector to my water clip and the fast color correct that contains a color wheel and this color wheel actually matches exactly onto the vectorscope so you've got red and magenta up here then you've got blue and cyan which match down here and then you've got green and yellow which again match yellow and green here now watch what happens when I actually pulled the color on this color wheel towards the green can you see home essentially shifting I'm shifting all of maggoty colors in my image down towards the green so now my image is mainly yellow and green and if we look at the image it sure looks green to me so we've shifted the color by pulling this color wheel and this matches the vectorscope so I can shift my colors from red and cyan downwards a little bit more into the neutral area now it's not quite that simple and we get to that in a minute but it's kind of cool to see how the color wheel effects the color in your image let's quickly reset this and have you ever wondered why hue angle is called hue angle what what does an angle have to do with color have a look on the vectorscope and i'm going to go in and change the hue angle and you can see that the color in my image is actually rotating around the center point so the color wheel actually gives me a really easy way to modify the color in my image and vectorscope shows me exactly where the colors fall within the spectrum another thing you will notice with the vectorscope as well is that it has this little fence of error here and this area actually defines the broadcast safe colors so your entire color information in the image should fall within this area the moment you go outside of this zone your image may no longer be safe for broadcast and the colors may not be represented properly to show you what I mean and again to explain a little bit more about the vectorscope let's go into the fast color character and what do you think is going to happen when I drop the saturation to zero well let's try it out and again keep an eye on the vectorscope I've just desaturated my entire image and on the vectorscope all of my colors fall within the center which is no color at all there is no red there's no magenta no blue no cyan no green and no yellow in my image it's just nothing but as I increase the saturation you can see the color coming back in so all of my colors push outwards and if I go a little bit too far right here we go way out of what is broadcast safe and if you look at my image the colors are way blown out so this would probably not work very well if it was being broadcast on TV let's bring the saturation back to a hundred and that is still within the safe range so that's all good and let's get on to actually fixing up the color in this image and getting rid of this weird red magenta tint that we can clearly identify from the RGB parade and the vectorscope and it is important to note that I didn't just look at the image stink all looks a bit red and started fixing it I looked at the image with the tools with the vectorscope and the RGB parade to ensure that what I'm seeing is actually correct and it's not just my monitor lying to me let me push the Scopes out of the way and let's quickly delete the fast color corrector for now so we're back to where we started let's first fix up the white balance of the image and remember that the RGB parade and the vectorscope show me the colors in my image as it's seeing in the preview window so I can actually restrict my video to an area that should be white like Walters shirt like just this area here and my vectorscope should show me nothing it should be pretty centered and my RGB parade should be very level they should all be pretty much the same because I shouldn't have any color tint in my image to do that again let's push the scopes out of the way and I'm going to come into opacity and I'm going to draw a mask now Premiere Pro I believe CC 2013 again introduced masks on the layers themselves which you don't have in older versions but in all the versions you can actually come into your effects panel and search further that doesn't exist in this version anymore in all the versions of Premiere Pro you have a garbage matte that you can use instead but it does essentially do the same thing what I'm going to do let's bring them the scopes again so you can see this happening let's go into the opacity of the layer select the pen tool or use a garbage matte if you don't have this feature and let's draw a mask on water shirt on an area that should be nothing but pure white BAM and both my vectorscope and pan RGB parade have been updated to only show me the content of my preview into which it's just this little snippet here that I've masked out and you can clearly see that this is not pure white the vectorscope clearly shows a magenta is tint because otherwise it would be centered to show you that there is no color information in this image and my RGB parade isn't even like my I would expect my red green and blue channel to be exactly level because otherwise this isn't why this is a tint of magenta this is a mix of red and blue which will give me magenta now there are again multiple ways to fix this but I just really like the curves effect what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for the curves effect and let's apply it to our layer and let's come down here what I want to do is essentially I want to level out my red green and blue channel to be even so that this is white and I want to see my vectorscope return to the center whenever you're working with an RGB parade or waveform monitor it is important to understand what highlights myths and shadows are and just in case you're not aware of it the highlights represent the bright parts in your image so it's usually in the range from a hundred to seven years then 7230 is usually you mids so you mid color brightnesses and then you shadows are at the bottom these are also known as gain gamma and lift in case you ever come across those terms and if you go into a curve and if you make change at the top end of the curve you are going to affect the highlights in the middle you're going to affect the myths and at the bottom you're going to affect the shadows now I want my red green and blue in my RGB parade to be on the same level and they're all in the highlight areas so the changes I have to make will be at the top end of these curves what I'm going to do first is I'm going to push the red one down a little bit and for that I'm going to come into my curves take the top end of my red curve and just push that down a little bit to maybe about here so I've pushed the red color down green maybe let's bring that up just a tad so pull it up a little bit and the blue is still way too high so again let's come into the blue channel in our curves effect and let's bring that down to about the same level as green and can you see the vectorscope how all of the color has been drained from our image and it's all centered around the middle this indicates that we are getting closer to white let me just tweak the blue a little bit and maybe I'll bring the red down just a tad so that in our vector scope it really is almost pure white and if you look at this image now this is looking pretty white to me let's disable the curves effect I can see a little bit of a purple tint on my monitor and again obviously the vectorscope shows that there is a magenta tint if I turn on my RGB parades the color is corrected now and it should be nice and white let's come back up and let's take away the mask and now our image is properly white balance so again this is the before you can kind of see a really ugly magenta tint and this is after one last point I want to talk about before I let you go our skin tones sometimes you can perfectly white balance an image but there's still a weird color tint on the skin tones and it just doesn't look natural so whenever I have a shot that includes a person I like to check that the skin tones are okay and the way we're going to do that is exactly the same way we did the white balance let's again bring back our scopes let's zoom in a little bit Walter's funny face let's grab the pen tool and let's mask out a piece of water skin now don't think I want to use this forehead it's a little bit too sweaty and shiny cause being a photographer for Walter is really hard work let's instead just use the side of his face it's a bit of his cheek BAM and again our vectorscope and our RGB parade are confined to just this little slice that we've masked out and this actually looks pretty good one interesting thing is that no matter what your skin color whether you're african-american Asian Caucasian or whatever your underlying skin tone color because of the blood that's running underneath your skin is always the same this makes colour correcting skin tones really easy because you should always see the exact same pattern in your RGB parade you always want red to be up at the top the highest then green and then blue towards the end and even more importantly on the vectorscope you want to see all of your saturation fall between this line between red and yellow this line here is actually known as the skin tone line and you want when you're masking out a piece of your skin your skin colors to fall along this line otherwise your skin tones in your video are not accurately represented I think I'm actually going to push a tiny bit more blue into this just to move this line over a little bit more towards the right actually maybe let's use the fast color corrector again because it has that nice color wheel that is really easy to use so let's apply a fast color corrector to our clip come back down in here and I actually want to change the shoe angle just a tiny bit to rotate this over a little there you go it's just two degrees over so the skin tones fall right onto this line and now let's come back up move the Scopes out of the way now let's get rid of the mask zoom back out and this is now a properly color corrected image let me bring the Scopes back in and disable the effects so this is the image we started with so it's just a little bit red magenta tinted we fixed all that up and pushed it down a little bit but then you can see the skin tones are just a little bit off and then we fixed that up as well and just pushed a little bit more life into the skin tones and this is the final image we ended up with color correction is a artform and I'm not the colorist I just learnt enough to get by but it is absolutely amazing how much better you can make your video look but just understanding and applying these simple techniques and that's all there is to it now that wasn't all that hard now was it I've video hope you enjoyed this tutorial and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the section below if you did enjoy this video I would greatly appreciate it if you could give it a thumbs up favourite it and share it with the world and if you do want to see more cool filmmaking and visual effects tutorials don't forget to go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later you

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 302,381

Keywords: premiere pro, color correction, tutorial, advanced, scopes, waveform monitor, rgb parade, vectorscope, white balance, color grading, exposure, skin tone line, cinematic look, film making, tips & tricks, surfaced studio, funny, instructions, help, professional look, high quality

Id: ZCA0MX6RtvE

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2016