The Ultimate Guide to Color Grading in Premiere Pro | FREE COURSE

it's time to take your footage from Dell to dramatic by learning how to color grade in Premiere Pro knowing how to color correct your footage and then how to create amazing looks through color grading are two of the most powerful skills a content creator can learn hey I'm Tom Graham for envato Tots plus and in this tutorial I'm going to take you through absolutely everything I can think of that you need to know when it comes to color grading your footage using the lumetri color effect in Adobe Premiere Pro together we'll look at the theory behind color correction and color grading and then we'll jump into Premiere to learn how to correct our footage from scratch as well as by using Luts design for both correction and color grading we'll look at Scopes full talk skin tone will correct we'll grade and then at the end of this course you'll walk away with all the tools that you need to get stuck into some fantastic color grading of your own because after all you're here to take your editing skills to the next level right you know what else is going to help you take your editing skills to the next level a subscription to envato elements which is an amazing resource where you can find millions of high quality creative assets including video templates stock footage music sound effects and much more with envato elements you can add professional touches to your videos and create exciting edits with ease so don't wait any longer click the link in the video description below and check out Enviro elements today trust me you won't be disappointed now grab a notebook because it's time to get into Premiere Pro there's going to be plenty of information in this course so I've gone through and I've left a detailed list of time-coded jumps down in the description so if you do want to jump forward to things like Luts or Scopes or cinematic looks feel free to do that but like a regular course I'm going to break this down into chapters so as you learn different parts of the process they'll start to kind of build on top of each other and form a bigger picture alright let's get started for real first up we're talking about color correction so to kick this whole course off we first need to talk about the difference between color correction and color grading well color correction as the name alludes to is the process of correcting an image that has been captured in camera in preparation for grading or correcting it to bring it in line with standard color spaces for example Rec 709 now why do we need to correct images shouldn't our camera just do this for us if we've set it up correctly well not necessarily when a modern digital cinema camera or even mini pro trimmer mirrorless cameras well when they capture an image they will often capture that directly from the sensor with little post processing in what is known as logarithmic footage or log for short put simply log footage is a flat image that is baking more details into the highlights mid-tones and shadows without applying any camera image correction like contrast or saturation log footage isn't intended to be displayed as a finished file though it's designed in a way that captures the most data and allows for the most Freedom when it comes to color correction and Grading there is of course raw footage as well which funnily enough is not actually footage it's the pure data taken directly from the sensor before it's even converted to a video format this is designed to give the ultimate freedom of movement in post-production as nothing is baked into to the footage whereas with log footage although we still have a huge amount of control and plenty of data to play with we still will be locked into the codec that it was captured in and other things will be baked into the image as well like white balance for example for the purpose of this course we'll focus on working with log footage as it's a much more common file type and it's more likely that you'll be working in this format so color correction is the process of taking that flat log footage and manipulating things like exposure contrast saturation as well as white ballots and tint adjustments and the purpose of Correction is to bring the image back from that flat capture format to something that more closely reflects the world around us color grading on the other hand is the process of taking that corrected footage and then adding specific looks to the footage through the use of different grading techniques we may still be changing the same parameters that we've done in the correction phase like contrast and saturation but in the color grading phase we'll be looking more specifically at manipulating the colors within the image to achieve different results these outcomes will be determined by things like location the dynamic of the scene the emotion of the characters and things of that nature now you may have also heard of Luts before and if you've been on envato elements you'll know that they have a huge library of creative Luts that are available to download and use on your footage to achieve strikingly different looks but what is a lot well the word Lut is actually an acronym for lookup table which at its core can be a quite complex scientific process to unpack but on the surface it's effectively a photo filter that can be applied over the top of your image to achieve different results there are many types of Luts and they aren't always just for grading there are a number of specific manufacturer correction Luts which are designed to take log footage from certain cameras and bring them into specific color spaces so for instance I currently work with the Sony fx30 mirrorless camera which I'm shooting on right now and I shoot in Sony s-log 3 cine so when correcting my images I use the Sony s-log 3 cine to rec 709 correction light as my starting point for all of my correction and Grading now these correction lights are designed to get the image into a ballpark space but obviously every shot will be a little different it won't be perfectly exposed the white balance might be off and the tint may need further adjustments and so on and so forth so lots are really helpful for this process but they aren't the be-all and end-all you first must know the fundamentals of how to correct and grade an image to best know how to utilize your Luts they are at the end of the day just another set of tools for the job now speaking of tools for the job what a great segue into talking about another set of invaluable tools when it comes to color correction and Grading that's right we're talking about Scopes Scopes may look really overwhelming and almost like a foreign language but don't worry you don't need to be too intimidated by them by the end of this chapter I'll show you which Scopes to pay attention to how to read them and better yet how to use them to your advantage when creating your looks importantly though why do we use Scopes well simply put we can't trust our eyes and we can't trust our monitors Scopes are there to represent the data in the file in a consistent objective way way and that's why it's really important to understand what we're looking at with the information that's displayed on the variety of Scopes that are available in Premiere Pro and other grading programs now think about it if you're creating content on a specific display and it looks good to your eye then that's totally okay if you're only ever going to display that image on this monitor however as soon as you export that piece of footage and upload it to YouTube or elsewhere then you lose all control over where that image is going to be displayed and each monitor will handle and present the image slightly differently so to get a consistent objectively correct image you need to use Scopes in order to help you get there so what are some common Scopes well in the lumetri panel here in Premiere Pro you have access to four Scopes the waveform parade histogram and vectoscope and all of these have slight variance on what they display as well depending on what your preference is the waveform monitor is a tool that displays the luminance levels of your footage in a graph format it helps to ensure that the image is properly exposed and that highlights and shadows are within the desired range the pro grade scope is similar to the waveform monitor but it separates the red green and blue channels and it displays them in separate graphs this allows for more precise color correction and balancing the histogram is a graphic representation of the tonal values of your image so it plots the darker tones on the left the mid-tones in the middle and the highlights on the right and you can see here it kind of represents the color in the image as well as the overall luminance you'll be familiar with this scope if you're a photographer the vectorscope is a tool that displays the saturation levels within the footage in a polar coordinate format it's used to measure and adjust the color balance and saturation of your footage it also helps to ensure that colors are within a desired range and that they are not too oversaturated or under saturated basically the closer that the data is clustered to the center of the scope will result in the image having less color and less saturation and as the colors become more saturated they expand outwards towards their respective position on the color wheel the vectoscope also has a handy skin tone indicator which we'll discuss very shortly now if I could only pick two to learn from then I would highly suggest that you select the parade and Vector scope using these two Scopes in conjunction with one another allows you to not only look at the exposure and contrast of an image but it also allows you to balance the color be that temperature and tint and this is via the parade and then also to balance the saturation of the image and more importantly the skin tone of your subject via the vectorscope we're really close to being able to jump into Premiere Pro now and start learning some color grading and color correction techniques but the last thing I do want to explain is skin tone as it often gets overlooked and it's really an important part and sometimes misunderstood part of the puzzle so the vectorscope here has a skin tone indicator which you can see represented by this line in short you want the skin tone of your subject to fall either on this line or slightly to the right of the line skin inherently has a lot of red in it and this line is the border between red and yellow and it's sitting slightly to the right of orange if you sway too much to the left of the indicator you end up with unnatural orange and yellow tones in the skin and if you sway too far right of the line you end up with unnatural magenta and purple Hues and if you go to the opposite end you end up with green skin now this doesn't just go for Caucasian skin all skin types are inherently red in tone and they occupy a remarkably narrow band of Hues and saturation when it comes to Scopes all skin is reflective and the pigmentation of someone's skin changes how the light is reflected but it doesn't change the inherent Hue of the skin itself so with that in mind healthy skin tones for all skin types need to sit somewhere on this line or slightly to the right of it depending on the look that you're going for we'll get more into precisely how to correct and color grade skin tones further into this course but I wanted to wrap our little Theory session up on that note so yes that does mean we're now ready to open up Premiere Pro together and take an overview of the tools that we're going to be working with I will make the Assumption here that you're relatively familiar with Premiere Pro and therefore we'll just be focusing on the color section and how to utilize the lumetri color effect if you do want to learn more about editing in Premiere Pro then be sure to check out the links in the description below to some of the great tutorials we have over on the tuts plus YouTube channel and while you're at it go ahead and hit that little subscribe button alrighty let's jump into the next chapter which is understanding the tools that we're going to be working with so like I said just moments ago I'm going to treat you as if you're relatively familiar with Premiere Pro I'm not going to walk you through everything uh that you need to know to kind of get started or anything like that but what I will do is we'll walk through the layout of the color tab so if you do open it up and you find yourself in the editing tab in version 23 at least of Premiere Pro which is what I'm currently working in you just go up to the top right hand side here where the color tab is and it will bring you into the color section of Premiere Pro now on the right hand side here we've got the lumetri color tab then we've got our program monitor in the middle and this is my friend Tom yet another Tom working in his little study here and I thought you know I've got to get some footage for this color grading tutorial and there's a lot of great color in this space and good skin tone as well that we'll be working on so thanks to Tom for volunteering his face to be part of this tutorial on the left hand side here we've got the lumetrius Scopes and if you don't immediately see these you might see effects controls or the audio mixer or something like that but what you would need to do is just click on the Scopes there down on the left hand side this is where our project files are we've got our timeline in the middle here and and that's basically the kind of layout of the color tab but what I'm going to walk you through now is kind of laying it out for color grading and the way I like to do it now this is by no means not the only way to do it but it's the way that I like to do it so first off we mentioned Scopes earlier and I said that let's work with the vectorscope and the parade so what we're going to do down on this little symbol here where the settings are for your Scopes we're going to turn off the histogram and we're going to turn off the waveform so now we've got our vectoscope and our parade now there are a whole bunch of different presets and different things like that and different color spaces that you can work in over here in the lumetri Scopes area of the color tab in Premiere Pro going that deep into color science in this kind of video is maybe not the right Avenue we need to take what we're going to do today we're going to work in the RGB space in terms of Scopes and we're working in a Rec 709 color space well it's defaulted to automatic here but we will be working in a Rec 709 for the most part I'm uploading to YouTube which is a bt709 or Rec 709 color space I am working on a Mac so there's some Rec 709a tagging that needs to be done but again if you want to Deep dive into color space and color science and things like that uh this is maybe not the video for you so we're going to take an Overlook here at how to color grade in Premiere Pro what I'm going to say leave it on RGB for now if you need to dive deeper into learning more about different color spaces and different colored Sciences please feel free to do so and also hit me in the comments if you've got any tips and tricks or great places to learn about color space because it can be really daunting for new people stepping into the color side of the industry to kind of work out uh what they need to do at the start because it's very scientific and it can get very deep so now that we've got those two Scopes up what I want to do is I want to just move a few things around here because I don't really need especially for this project I don't really need to see my timeline the whole time but what I do want is I want quite a big program monitor so I'm going to bring my program monitor just down here next to my timeline so I can still go back and forth between my timeline and my program monitor should I need to and then I'm going to move over here my limitry color tab going to move this up a little bit more so I've got more vision of what I'm working on move this across here like so because we don't really need to see our project settings and then this way we've kind of got our scopes at the top so this is really all I need to see if you do want to save the workspace that you're working in so that you can easily get back to this preset you can go up to window and then go workspaces and then go save a new workspace so let's do that now we'll call this TG color and now if I go up to window and I go workspaces and I go reset to save layout which is what we were on before and now if I open up the program and it defaults to this I can go back go window workspaces go TG color and it should give me what I need and again I just need to click over to the program monitor here and not my timeline so there we go that's how you set up the workspace and set a preset so that you can continue working on it next time so now we're going to take an overview of the lumetri color effect but we won't actually dive into changing things right now I'm just going to give you a basically a road map of what we're looking at so you've got basic correction creative curves color wheels and match hsl secondary and vignette we'll start with basic correction basic correction is correction we've already talked about the difference between correction and color grading so this is where you would correct your image this is where I would bring in a correction Lut or I would make corrections to my contrast highlight Shadows temperature tint all those things that you're seeing here and these are just sliders left to right so you're plusing or minusing creative this is where you start to dial in your look so if you've got basic correction correction creative is color grading so this is where you start to dial things in but it's not necessarily manual color grading this is where I would be using Luts to get a look when I've already done my basic correction and we will go through that very shortly so this is where you can input the Luts that you want to work with and you can see here Premiere Pro has a whole bunch of like creative looks already built in to kind of replicate different things like Kodak Fuji there's a whole bunch of things in there we might have a look at that briefly as well but you can also bring in your own files as well which we will be doing and this is where you can make some slight adjustments to those Luts those creative looks that you can add to your corrected footage in curves here you've got RGB curves so this top one here is where you would do a contrast curve for instance doing a little S curve would add some contrast to your footage and you can do that either in your luminance or separate the RG and B values and you can do it that way and then you've got some different options as well that are kind of come into play when you want to start tweaking things so you've got Hue versus saturation so you can pick a cue within the image and you can either saturate it or desaturate it you've got Hue versus Hue so you can pick a hue and shift that Hue Hue versus Luma where you can pick a cue and increase or decrease the luminance you've got Luma versus saturation which is where you can pick a bright or a dark area of the image and then you can increase or decrease that saturation and then finally we've got saturation versus saturation which is quite specific and I kind of need to show you this in situ once we start grading but basically you can take a saturated part of the image let's say the Green in this image was more saturated than this red what we can do using the saturation versus saturation curve and looking at our vectorscope we can basically make sure that both the green and the red are equally or you know are equally saturated if that's what we want to go for and this is a way we can start seeing that moving on to our color wheels and match this for me is where I would do my manual grading so on the left hand sliders here for your shadows your mid-tones and your highlights often known as lift gamma and gain if you're working in something like DaVinci Resolve on the left hand side here is your luminance if you increase it you're increasing the luminance of one of these values or decreasing the luminance of one of these values so in this case the shadows and you can just double click these and it sends it back to the middle now this color wheel here if you grab the little uh Crosshair in the middle you can click that and drag it towards you know whatever color value you want on the color wheel and that will bring the Shadows or the mid tones or the highlights into that world and you can see over on our vectoscope the further we go out the more saturated we're getting as well and I'm double clicking that to go back into the center so this is where you can start to do a grade so we've got a relatively flat image here if we wanted to just add some contrast into that you can bring the Shadows down we'll bring our highlights up a little bit and then we'll play with our mid tones adding a little bit of color into here just briefly like this and all of a sudden we've got uh you know gone from a desaturated image a log image to something that's starting to have a bit of a grade on it and that was very quick but don't worry I'm going to walk you through that in much more detail as we go okay second to last here we've got hsl secondary now this section is used to change a specific color so basically if you want to color change something in the image you can do that here let's say again we want to use the example of this red we wanted to change that color we can use these keying tools to select that color and then change it on the wheel and we'll do that a little later on when we actually have some more color detail in this image finally you've got vignette and basically this creates a vignette around the image negative it and you've got black positive and you've got white and then you can change other things as well like where the midpoint sits uh you can change the roundness of the vignette and you can feather that vignette out or in so just add a little bit of moodiness to your shot that way so that's vignette let's just reset all of this stuff right now and we'll get into the next section which is actually starting our color grain so as I promised earlier we are going to look at a couple of different versions of color grading our images in Premiere Pro using the lumetri color effect and the first way we're going to do that is by starting with a correction Lut so up in our basic correction section here we're going to go and find our correction Lut so for this piece of footage that we'll be working on in this tutorial I captured this on a Sony fx30 mirrorless camera in s-log 3 which is Sony's log footage kind of proprietary codec and I shot that with the S gamut 3 cine profile which is a bit of a mouthful but it does pay to know where the footage that you're working with came from and how it was captured so for instance some more information about this shot is that it was captured in 10 bit 422 so it should actually have a bit more depth here for us to actually create this look so with that information at hand I'm going to go to my basic correction tab go to my input Lut and I'm going to find my camera specific correction light now if you click on this drop down here you've got a few that are baked into premium a pro so if you're working with Alexa like you you've got your log C direct 709 here you've got some Phantom stuff there's a few bits and pieces here but if you go into custom you can add your own so now you just need to navigate through to where they are on your finder or explore a window and what we've got here is we've got the s-log 3s gamut3. cine to LC 709 type A now again we're not going to get too far into the color science side of things but I'm working on a Mac so I'm going to be working with the type A Lut click OK and there we go we've now corrected our footage now if I turn this light off again let's just have a look at our scopes this is a in my opinion a well-exposed piece of footage now I did shoot it as well so uh you know I get to say that about my footage nothing is Overexposed our highlights are under our limit here and nothing is underexposed so I've got plenty of uh room to play in the shadows now is a little noisy down in the shadows here but we can correct that up so turning on our basic correction light again and you can see here what that has essentially done has added contrast and saturation turn it off again and we'll look at the Scopes we've gone from a relatively small band we'll ignore these highlights up here in the 90 but let's look at kind of 70 through to 20. that's most of our image is sitting within 70 and 20 and now if we turn our basic correction Lut back on we've gone to below 10 which is fine we don't want to go anywhere below zero and we haven't hit 100 yet basically 100 is pure white zero is black and if you push your image either above 100 or below black you start to crush those highlights or Shadows and you're not adding or subtracting anything you're just deteriorating the image at that point so that's a pretty good place to start creating a look from because let's be honest it's a correction Lut I shot it relatively well and this correction light works specifically for this camera but if we did want to change some things like for instance I captured this at 5600 Kelvin color temperature but let's say we want the white balance to shift a little bit or we want to do a little bit of an auto white balance in our white balance section we can grab the eyedropper tool here and click on our image where we see something that we deem is white so I would say this part of the frame here is white we click that and it is just going to shift our white balance ever so slightly so I'm happy with that that's looking good now under here we got our tint and our saturation so our tint at the moment has with that white balance it has adjusted by negative 0.8 slightly towards the green end and it is because we've got quite a lot of red in this wood here we've got a lot of red in the wood of this table obviously we've got red in this image here a lot of red in your skin and we'll get into the skin shortly and the only real green that we're seeing is coming through from a little bit of this green light out in the backyard I don't think this needs a tint adjustment so I'm going to leave that and saturation wise I'm happy where the saturation has come to for this correction part of the image we can add more saturation in as we start to create our look in terms of exposure again I'm happy with the exposure but I think maybe that could be a little bit more contrast so I'm just going to dial up the contrast a little bit here and you can see I'm looking at my scopes there we go and I'm looking at the image as well but importantly looking at my scopes and I've pushed that to where I like it but I can see now those highlights are starting to clip up a little bit especially in the blue channel so I'm going to go up to my highlights over here and I'm just going to bring the highlights down a peak and I'm going to grab the whites as well and bring them down from the top so there we go if I just turn this little bit off and on you can see what we've done there so I'm really happy with that but what happens if I don't have this correction Lut on hand well let's just go through and we'll reset everything we've done and we'll get back to this correction in the manual way so I'm going to reset so now the input light is not there what I want to do first is I want to kind of add some contrast to this image so I'm going to grab my contrast I'm just going to start to push this out I don't want to go too hard with the contrast itself because I don't want to just expand these you know at a at a general rate I want to I want to expand them to a point but then I want to start bringing the individual levels down so we'll start with the blacks here pull them down and then I'm going to bring the Shadows down a little bit keep bringing the blacks down see now they're just starting to touch here on the bottom which I don't want so I'm just going to drag them back up and I'm going to do the same now with our highlights and our white so I bring the highlights up quite a bit remember we were sitting mostly through 70 and then 20. let's bring that whites up toward the top bring these highlights up a little bit more pull the Shadows pull the blacks and now I'm going to pull the highlights back down drop out contrast just a little bit there and it is all about finesse especially when you're doing it manually so now let's look at our white balance I can do the automatic eye dropper tool again and there's no harm in doing the automatic eyedropper tool because it does a very good job so I'm going to click in the same white area and we've just shifted the white balance a little bit but here I think it probably needs just a little little bit of magenta I'm going to add just a tiny bit of Magenta in and now I'm going to play with the saturation a little bit so there we go think that is looking pretty good to my eye let's turn it off and on again and look it's not going to be exactly the same as the correction light but you've gotten to pretty much the same place without that correction light what I'm going to do is I'm going to reset this and I'm going to bring the correction light back in and then we'll start looking at how to add a look using Luts so there we are our correction light is back in there and as you can see there's a little bit more saturation coming into the image now than when we did it manually but that's okay it doesn't matter how you get there as long as you get to a final image that you're happy with and that is kind of sitting well within your Scopes then then we're all good so moving down to the creative section now so as I mentioned before this is where you would put your creative looks or creative Luts and start to adjust those so you need to have your basic correction done for then this section to work so what you can do is you can scroll through these here and this is all the inbuilt ones that are in Premiere Pro so let's just find something that we might want to use let's say this blue steel the whole image isn't going to look like this because this is showing a preview of what this Lut would do if you were not already in a corrected space but if I double click this image now it's going to apply this Lut over the top of our corrected image so we double click that and you can see there we've just got some really beautiful Blues in these shadows and this section up here used to be quite green but now we've pushed into that kind of yellowy area so I'm just going to take this off for a second and what we want to do is look at our lumetri Scopes here up in our vectorscope specifically have a look at the parade as well what happens when I turn this back on we're going to get a little bit more contrast in the parade but more specifically what I want you to look at over here is in the vectorscope and see just how much the color information in this image shifts when I turn this on so we've gone from probably yellow and green being the most saturated area and in red which is sort of all this area through here turning this on and now we're really far into the blue and we've kind of gone up between yellow and red somewhere sitting in Orange and I think that is a really really nice looking image but let me show you what it looks like if I turn the basic correction off so we've just got this kind of blue image and this is really demonstrating to you that creative Luts and things like that that you can get off say envato elements for instance and I will show you some of those very shortly they're tools for the job so you need to know how to use them in conjunction with other tools like the basic correction light so get your image corrected back to kind of reality back to this 709 color space if that's what you're working in then go ahead and apply your creative Lut and that's how you get a really nice beautiful Creative Image now of course we can adjust the intensity of this overlay as well this Lut so we can go really far and get really moody if we want which looks a bit too intense I would say I would dial it back less is more or we can just basically turn it almost off just introducing a little bit of it there if we don't want it to be too stylized now again have a look if I go all the way to the left here on the intensity and have a look at the vectorscope here as I move all the way to the right you'll see all that color information just shifting shifting shifting and then spreading out basically saturating all the way to Orange and all the way to Blue for that classic kind of teal and orange look so I think that looks really good you can add some faded film here in these little adjustments so these are just cosmetic upgrades I guess everything is cosmetic when you are when you're doing color grading work but faded film just lifts the shadows and gives us that kind of like milkiness in the shadows uh it doesn't chain I guess it does change the overall contrast but we're not really doing anything to the highlights we're just kind of lifting those Shadows which is something I guess you would get when you're looking at like film processes or something like that uh sharpening we can add a bit of sharpening to the image here and that's just pulling out some detail in his face uh Vibrance this is an interesting one so saturation is going to saturate the entire image it's going to take every bit of color information and have a look at our vectorscope there and just stretch it out to different saturation levels just going to command Ed to undo what I've just done there now have a look at the vectorscope when I change the Vibrance here it's not taking everything and just stretching it out it's picking certain colors and saturating them picking colors that are already kind of like saturated in this image but not taking the overall color and saturating outwards in a uniform way so Vibrance just adds a little bit of ah you know wow factor I guess to the image rather than just overly saturating the entire thing and you can see that kind of in the walls here if I saturate you're just going to get this yellow glow happening on the walls but if I shift the Vibrance you're going to get mostly like his skin tone his shirt a little bit of this Leaf this kind of you know color that we've got going on there's artworks in the background that's what's going to start coming out of this so that's how you can use those there so that there is color grading and color correcting with Luts but that's the built-in ones that are in Premiere Pro so let's just reset this here we're going to go back up to our basic correction we're going to once again grab our correction Lut get that into the space that we're happy with we're not going to tweak that any further go to our creative now what happens if we want to bring it in some creative let's say from envato elements well glad you asked because I've got some ready to go so in the creative section here go into your look drop down go to custom once again like we did in basic correction and then just navigate to the looks that you want to use so let's just use something from this pack here I got from envato elements I'll have the link in the description down below to this pack and all of the other assets that I've used in this course now if you go into the Lut section here you can see there's some different options what you're looking for when it comes to video Luts in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve or any other programs you're working with are cubes so they're dot Cube files that's what you're looking for these other Luts here are four different programs uh you can see here some packs come with Lightroom presets and Photoshop presets and things like that what we want for video is Luts and cubes so let's just pick one um Mordor how about we do Mordor three Cube hit open and we'll see what that does there we go so that's added that there it's kind of desaturated the image by the looks of it and it's given us a little bit more of a kind of a yellowy glow and from here again we can go down and we can change things like we did before with the Vibrance and the saturation and you know a bit of faded film if we want to go for that look and I think actually in this image that kind of looks pretty good but let's try a different one just for the sake of it we've got here go back to browse again and we'll go to um what have I got here vaporware let's just get something a little bit crazy um uh let's try lucky number 17 why not there we go so now I've added a whole bunch of kind of pink elements to the walls and stuff here and his shirts coming out as a nice very very cyan you can see there the cyan is really saturated uh but you know I think this is quite cool you can dial it down a little bit and what I would do here now that we've got this look dialed in is you can go back to your basic correction and start to kind of pull down some elements so I felt like it was very very Overexposed when we bought that in so I'm just going to bring the whites down bring the highlights down a bit uh play with our contrast and let's see where we go here again like I said before it's all about finesse and just kind of getting you into that right spot so I think that's looking pretty cool actually uh you can see that we're still pushing into that cyan but we don't have that big washout that we had earlier and then we can go back into our creative section and we can play again with our faded film our Vibrance get a little bit of sharpening up there and then we can play with the tint balance as well so if what we've got here is a lot of cyan in the shadows what we can do is we can push the Shadows to cyan to push that even more let's just go down to something like this and then our highlight you know usually you want to do opposite so that's why teal and orange works really well so if you've got cyan here the opposite of that is red so let's push the highlights towards red and we'll go a little bit more to that kind of ready orange side of things and now we can shift The Tint balance as well so we can shift between the red of the highlights and the blue of the Shadows so let's find a happy medium there and I think something like that looks pretty good so we've gone from this our log image to this but you know in between we've gone from our log image to our basic correction which we've done some toggling and then we've added our creative light from envato elements to give ourselves this kind of really nice teal and magenta and red look just kind of adds a whole different dimension to this image makes some things like his shirt pop uh what I don't like what it's doing is that outside area but again color grading is all a bit subjective you as long as you're kind of looking at your Scopes and you're not pushing things into crazy a direction then you've got some room to move so this has been color correcting and color grading with lots but how do we do this manually in Premiere Pro let's throw out the Luts we won't use them at all we want to start from a log image and create a look all by ourselves just using the tools that are available here in the lumetri color effect well that's in the next chapter so let's move on to it so I've reset our image back to zero here and we're going to start again so instead of basic correction or creative I'm going to first go to my color wheels and match now there's different schools of thought with this some people like to start in curves they like to add a little bit of a contrast s-curve here by grabbing the highlights and the Shadows adding a little contrast curve here and a contrast curve like that playing around with this until they kind of get somewhere that they like and you know using this as a starting point and this is totally okay but to be honest this isn't the way that I like to work so I like to use the RGB curves as kind of tweaks rather than as my basis of a grade so this is not how I'm going to show you how to do it I'm going to show you my way of doing it so instead of Curves I'm going to go into color wheels and match and now this has everything I need to get started to integrate and actually start to push the grade in a nice creative way so you've got your shadows your mid-tones and your highlights and like I said before the luminance slider on the left and then your color wheel in the middle here so what I'm going to do first is I'm going to grab my shadows and I'm going to bring my Shadows down just get them somewhere towards the bottom and I'm looking mainly here at the parade so just trying to get these Shadows just somewhere down towards zero but again being very careful not to hit that Zero Bar then I'm going to take my highlights and I'm going to take them all the way up and I'm going to extend them out until they hit almost 100 we don't want them to actually hit 100. so now that's basically my contrast range again we were looking before at this image when it was corrected with our correction Lut and that was between 70 and 20. most of the image was sitting between there that's sort of where we are now but I actually think it needs our mid-tones to come up a little bit so I'm going to bring our mid tones up which means we're losing contrast but now I can bring our shadows back down and create a bit more drama in the shadows here I'm going to bring our highlights down a bit just to adjust there we go and I think that's looking all right in terms of our contrast now what I do want to do is I want to add a little bit of color into our shadows and midtones and our highlights what I'm going to mostly look at is his skin in this part so I'm going to bring just a little bit of blue into our shadows here there's already a bit of blue with this shirt and things like that we've got a bit of blue over here mid tones I'm going to push slightly towards orange and then our highlights I'm going to push up towards the red now we don't have a lot of saturation in here yet it's it's saturating over into our yellows now greens mostly because of this section here but we really don't have a lot of saturation in the rest of the image so how can we do that well this is where we go back up to our basic correction so from here I'm just going to start to increase the saturation a little bit and we can see here that's starting to increase out on our vectoscope so I don't want to go too far go around here and then I'll start to pull it back and I'm going to just change our temperature as well I think we're looking a little warm so I'm going to go on the cooler side and I'm going to add in I think just by eye here just a little bit of magenta so that's looking pretty good to me there I'll make a few more adjustments just in this section so I'm going to bring my highlights up a little bit and then I'm going to bring my Shadows down just to add a bit more contrast in these mid-tone areas and then what are we doing I'll just pull the whites down a little bit and just playing with the Shadows I don't want to lose too much in the bottom half here so I'm pretty happy with that now I'm going to go back to our curves so like I said before I like to make little tweaks so I've already kind of got to a nice place but I want to make tweaks now so I'm going to add just a little bit more contrast in here just by grabbing this and making a bit of an S curve I want to start to crush the blacks a little bit in the bottom here and then let's see where these highlights come in probably around just around about here that's nice so where we've got the highlights coming in but really I just want the highlights on his face to be the ones that we're kind of looking at and that's what you're seeing here in the image so now I want to look at our Hue versus our saturation what I can see here over on the vectorscope is that this yellow and green is really popping over here and I actually want it to be a little bit less Poppy so I'm going to select the Hue and then I'm going to desaturate it and the way I do that is either Hue versus saturation curve I'll grab the eyedropper here I will grab the eyedropper over the green and that's created three little keyframes so basically I can grab the middle keyframe which is the one that is identified and then these are the outer limits I can grab the middle keyframe and I'll bring it down to desaturate it so I'll just go all the way down so you can see there I've basically taken all the color out of this image here or sorry this part of the image now if I push it all the other way I've just absolutely cranked the saturation which you can see up here but what I want it to sit is at basically the same kind of saturation that we've got going on with the rest of the color so it's around about here so I'm going to grab that looking at the vector scope there's a little bit of an input delay so we'll just go slowly and something around that looks pretty good to me I'm also now looking at the image as well making sure that it doesn't look too out of place so I'm going to turn this off and on so you can see so that was with it saturated and this is with it just desaturated a little bit and I think that now matches the rest of what we've got going on here so that was the first thing that was kind of bothering me about the color in the image now what I really like about this image is that he's very well lit compared to the background and all those kind of things so what I want to do is I want to kind of grab his skin tone and just raise it a little bit in terms of the luminance so what I'm going to do is grab the eyedropper tool on the Hue versus Luma curve and I'm just going to hover that over and then click on his Temple here and as you can see that's added a keyframe over the red section here like I mentioned before a lot of red in skin and we can just raise that just a little bit if I go down you'll see there we're you know putting him into Shadow and this is where the image starts to degrade if we go too high the image is degrading as well so I'm just going up ever so slightly there and I'll turn that off and on to see what we're working with all I've done is just separated him from the background just a little bit and it is bringing up the table and stuff as well but because that background behind his head is a different Hue we can now grab the eyedropper tool and maybe select something like here and you can see that's added this new one here I'll just bring that down slightly and now we've made him really pop out from the background and it's very subtle where we're working with subtle changes now so that's kind of where I want to get to in terms of the color of the image here so if I go up to my curves and I turn this off and on again we haven't done a huge amount in this section we've just added a little bit more color detail to the image and changed our contrast just a bit so now I'm going back to where I started which is the color wheels and match section and what I want to start doing here is really add that color and drama to the image so I'm going to play again with our shadows our mid-tones and our highlights and I'm going to just add more color into these so I'm going to pull more blue into our shadows here and we'll go again trying to replicate what we did before that bit of that kind of teal and orangey look we'll bring more blue into the Shadows like I've just done we'll push more orange into the highlights and again we'll just push this around in our highlights here sorry that was mid-tones before now we're working with the highlights and let's see where we can get to this again just playing seeing what comes to taste here so I think that's starting to look somewhat in the realm of where I want it to yeah it's looking good it's looking nice and Moody here and we are just going to change the skin a little bit in a moment as well finally before we change the skin I'm going to add just a little bit of a vignette basically just to again draw our attention to him I don't want to go too hard on this so I'm just going to play around with it and then pull it back a little bit somewhere around about there and this is my off and on off and on so that's looking good now finally I'm going to go to hsl secondary and this is where we're going to start to grab his skin tone and make sure we're correcting for that so I'm going to use the little eyedropper tool here to set the color and I'm going to pick his skin tone which is on his Temple here and now if I go to color gray if I check this box here we're going to see just that tone that I've picked and this is where we can use these sliders to make sure that we're actually picking his skin tone and not like all the walls and things like that around it so let's just adjust these so we're just getting his skin tone but try not to get the wall around it we may have to do a little bit of widening of these so that's kind of got his skin tone there getting a little bit of his arm his neck his face and now we can denoise this a bit as well so if I denoise this and blur it out that's going to do wonders for us and now what I want to do is I want to just play around with our sliders here just to bring in the kind of color that we want to see in his skin and again I'm looking over at our skin tone indicator here on our vectorscope we can see that skin tone line like we said before we want it to be on or just to the right of the line so I'm kind of playing with the temperature here just playing with the tint a little bit pushing that over towards magenta and in our correction I want to move this to a three bar here because skin has quite a bit of blue in the shadows so I'm going to bring just a bit of blue into that and bring some orange into the mid tones and you can see again having a look at our Vector scope we're on that line now and then bringing a bit of red into the highlights and we'll see where that lands see it's on or just slightly to the right of our skin tone indicator now if I turn off this color check button you can see here if I turn off and on hsl secondary you can see now his skin just kind of Pops compared to the rest of the image and I'm really happy with that I think it really pops but we've got a nice natural skin tone so there we go that is our footage corrected and graded from scratch in Premiere Pro using the lumetri color tab let's say we're really happy with where we've got to right now how do we replicate that across our other images that we've got in the timeline like so well it's relatively simple we could just copy and paste the effect over if we wanted to if we go up to our effects controls let's go back to our editing tab so we can see this more clearly if we select the piece of footage that we've been working on and then go into our effects controls here hit lumetri color hit command C go over to our other image click into our effects controls hit command V and there we go we've just pasted that lumetri effect and you can see here that has done a pretty good job at color grading our footage because it was shot in the same conditions it's using the same color it's using the same light and we'll play it through and it looks nice and clean nice and consistent this one here is a little bit more Moody you know probably slightly different lighting conditions but we can tweak those and we can actually match them so that's the easy way of copying the lumetri color effect over to another piece of footage and before I show you how to match these two in Premiere I'll quickly show you how you can export that as a Lut so I'll just go up to our original piece and I'll go back into our color that I'll go up to our lumetri color effect up here and I'll hit the little Hamburg menu and I'll come down to export.cube so there we go now we can go export.cube and I'm just going to bring it into our Lut section here and go TG Lut save and that's there now if we went back over in here and we reset this we can go into our basic correction go import light browse find out TG light and there we go all of that color information has now been added to our image which I'm really happy about it's really simple and really easy to do foreign but how do we match these images like I said before well if you go down to color wheels and match we've only looked at color wheels so far but what does the match mean well if you go to comparison View and click that it's now going to take the two pieces of footage that you've got on your timeline here or you can move through your timeline like so and find the other piece that you want to match if you had multiple pieces so this little scroll bar here is basically saying what piece on the timeline you want to look at what you want to reference sorry and then what piece you want to change so we're clicking on here because we want to change this one and we want to reference the piece that we already did before which is this so how does this work in terms of our Scopes well let's go up and we'll change our view again like we did earlier workspace and TG color now it's a bit hard to see but we are actually looking at two scopes on one scope here so if you look at the parade and I go up to basic correction now remember we're correcting this piece of footage and we're referencing this if I just change the exposure all the way up on this one to demonstrate you can see here that this is actually splitting that red green and blue values up into two separate images so on the left hand side I've got this piece of footage that I'm referencing and then on the right hand side I've got this piece of footage here as you can see I've cranked the exposure just to show this so if I reset that exposure now you can see if I make slight changes here you can see that we're reflecting that over here on our scope so that's how we can use these to match so what we need to do is we need to analyze the reference frame here and then we need to make those changes over on our current frame I'm going to go back into my old friend color wheels and match which is what we're looking at in comparison view that's how you get to this but we want to go and play with the Shadows the midtones and the highlights and basically just try and even these out on the Scopes so first of all I'm going to tackle the Shadows so just grabbing the shadow slider here and starting to bring that down so I'm looking at a combination of our Scopes and our program monitor here and now we want to look back at our highlights uh sorry our mid-tones and we want to bring those back up into this kind of like 60 range and then we want to go to our highlights and kind of even those out as well so let's bring those up a little bit and it will be different here because we do have that daylight coming through the window in our reference which is this really high area here but what I'm really looking at is kind of our middle section here which is this bit of light that's bouncing off Tom's forehead so that's gotten us somewhat into the realm of similarity and I think we'd probably just go a little bit further with our shadows and if anything we can add another little vignette as well just to really bring that in because it's come across without uh Lut but it hasn't really come across as intense as we want it to so now I would say they're looking pretty similar but if you do really want to check this out you can hit this middle button here which is vertical split and now you've got the ability to basically wipe the two frames together and you can see there we're pretty much bang on I'm I'm happy with that and it doesn't have to be exactly exactly the same because remember this is going to show up in a timeline view so if we go up to our editing section and we play these two pieces of footage back to back let's just play it through and I'll turn off our comparison view here so you can just click that button here going back to our regular program monitor play this through that looks like it matches really well so I'm really happy with that but going back into our color tab the Keen eyed viewers amongst you might have noticed that in our color wheels a match when I go to comparison view I also get this little apply a match button underneath so let's investigate what that is so let's click over to this piece of footage here I've taken the Lut off it so we're back to our log footage and we're going to reference this image and we want to basically apply a match to this current image so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to click apply match and we'll see what happens and there you go it's done a pretty good job but in my honest opinion I think we've did a better job uh kind of manually matching these two together you can see here the Vibrance of the shirt isn't that good uh you know the skin tone is really good and obviously the face detection there is basically looking at the faces in both and trying to match those so you can use this see how you go with the apply match using a little bit of fun AI stuff that's happening underneath the hood in Premiere Pro but uh to be very honest I prefer to do it the manual way because I think yeah we got into a much better spot there all right moving on from that all right so we're pretty much at the end of the tutorial here but I really want to just leave you with a couple of extra little tips and tricks about color grading in Premiere Pro now what I've been doing so far is color grading on the specific pieces of footage that I'm working with so let me just delete these uh lumetri color effects from these pieces of footage so we're now back down to where we are and remember these are basically exactly the same in terms of our exposure and our color we had to do a little bit of tweaking which we just saw in the comparison view but if you do have a whole bunch of footage like this that's from the same camera it's exposed pretty well you can do a adjustment layer grade so right clicking over here in the project panel go new item and go adjustment layer and you'll just click OK it'll basically make it the same size as your timeline if you set it to default like this so that will come in here and you can pull this over the top now make sure that it's sitting directly over the top of both of your pieces of footage and at the moment nothing's happened but all you need to do is you need to click on that adjustment layer and then go up to color then go into our basic correction like we did before and go input light go browse and let's bring in our TG love that we made before hit OK and we'll go back to our editing and now you can see that that color grade has been brought across both of our pieces of footage here and it's actually on our adjustment layer so when we turn that adjustment layer off and on there we go that's our color grade so if you had a whole bunch of footage in this timeline here really easy to just grab this adjustment layer and drag that over the pieces of footage that you want this color grade to appear on and now look the last little piece of advice I'll give you because I know everyone wants to get that cinematic look and they want to get those black bars to bring things into a I guess more traditional quote unquote cinematic widescreen aspect ratio and if you do want to learn more about aspect ratios there'll be a little video link popping up right now I made a really fun Deep dive into the history of the aspect ratio recently on the envato touch plus YouTube channel I'm a big film nerd I love nerding out on this kind of stuff so go and have a watch of that video to learn more about the fascinating history of the aspect ratio but if we do want to get a cheap and quick cinematic look to our 16x9 footage here what we can do is really simple we can just create a couple of black bars at the top and bottom of our screen and you can do that by just going new item color matte and then cropping that to fit but how do we know that we're getting the right aspect well if we go new item and go sequence first then we can create a sequence in here that's the right aspect ratio that we want to go for and then kind of retrofit that within our timeline using those color mats so if we want say a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio that's 3840 by 1634 so let's go 38.40 by 16 34 and you can see here that's come up with 1920 by 817 but let me assure you it's a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio so I'm going to hit OK actually first of all I'm going to call this sequence a 2.35 and hit ok now in this sequence I want to right click and go new item and go color matte and we'll hit OK and I'm going to make this bright red hit okay here we'll bring that color matte in here and then if I zoom out here let's go like 25 so you can see the aspect ratio that we're working with I should be able to copy this command C go back into our Tom working click into our timeline here click command V and paste that in and now you can see we've got this lovely overlay which is the right aspect ratio that we're going for but how do we invert that how do we get those black bars well again like I said it's a little bit of twing and throwing but we're going to right click go new item go color matte and this time we're going to make a black one and let's call this uh top bar we're going to drag top bar in over the top and then over in our effects tab here we're going to search for a crop we're going to add that onto our top bar and then we're going to crop the bottom of this until it hits our little aspect ratio guide there now I'm going to go back into our project I'm going to copy the top bar paste it and I'm going to call this Bottom bar Bottom bar and then we'll move this in to our timeline and I'm going to order them so the top bar is above Bottom bar I'm going to click on top bar click crop add that into our Bottom bar and then grab our Bottom bar and move that all the way down so it matches right at the bottom of the screen there delete our color matte and then add that over the top and now Bob's your uncle we've got 235 to 1 aspect ratio bars on our 16x9 footage so there we go we've got our nice cinematic look here we've got our color grade that we did in Premiere Pro in the lumetri color tab we've got that sitting on an adjustment layer and we've got our top and bottom bars to simulate the 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio footage sitting Within a16 by nine frame now you could also bring the footage into a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio timeline like we've already created but this way you get complete control over it so let's say for instance you want to adjust this first shot to have uh you know the Cinematic bars on it let's say this was your b-roll then you wanted to go into say like interview footage that didn't have the 2.35 to 1 bars on it you could very easily do that all within one timeline there you've got your cinematic b-roll and then you've got your 16x9 interview for instance anyway a couple of tips and tricks there at the end of our everything you need to know about color grading in the lumetri color tab in Premiere Pro tutorial right here on inverted touch Plus so there we go I think that's everything I could possibly think of that you need to know when it comes to color correcting and color grading in Premiere Pro I'm really glad you took this course with me and I really hope you got something out of it of course if you do want to let me know down in the comments if there's something that you think maybe I missed out or there's something else that you want to learn I'm all ears if you do want to learn a little bit more about envato elements make sure to click that link in the description below and lastly but not least get subscribed to the envato touch plus YouTube channel right now because we're putting out great free content like this daily okay until next time happy color grading [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 80,082

Keywords: premiere pro color grading, premiere pro, adobe premiere pro, color grading tutorial, color grading, premiere pro color grading tutorial, adobe premiere pro tutorial, color correction premiere pro, color grading in premiere pro cc, lumetri color, how to color grade in premiere pro, color correction, how to color grade, premiere pro color grading plugin, premiere pro color grading presets, premiere pro color grading for beginners, premiere pro color grading 2023

Id: knJjc9eg8Kg

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023