Correcting color and lighting with Adjustments

- [Instructor] Sometimes your video files need a little cleanup, you've shot a video of someone standing in the shade and it's too dark to see them, or the color isn't quite right, or it's not vivid enough, or the sound is good, but not great. The adjustments panel in Premiere Elements includes a number of tools for correcting your movie's lighting and color, as well as for enhancing your movie's audio, and we have a couple of troubled clips here on our timeline. Let's select a clip, and you do have to select a clip when you open the adjustments panel, let's select a clip on our timeline and let's go to the adjustments panel by going to the top of the toolbar and clicking on adjustments.

Here in the adjustments panel you'll find Smart Fix, which automatically fixes clips and sometimes does a pretty good job. A number of fixes here and correctors for correcting color and your video, as well as a number of tools here for improving or cleaning up your audio. That said, we've got a clip here that's clearly too dark and we need to brighten it up. Let's try Smart Fix and see how well it does on its own. So let's toggle it open, and simply click on apply, and there it does a pretty good job, it actually brightened it up, it kept the contrast high, gave us a really nice, kind of smart fix of what was an overly dark clip, but let's reset that, I'm just gonna click on the reset button here next to Smart Fix and let's see what we can do on our own.

Let's try Gamma Correction, a gamma correction just kind of gives you an overall brightening effect and, as you can see, most of these other options here in the adjustment panel for video, most of them include what's called a quick edit preview tool. It's got little thumbnails on here, and to use it, you simply click on the thumbnail that represents the correction you want to make, so here we are in Gamma Correction with our clip selected on the timeline, let's try just adding a little bit of brightness to it, a little more brightness.

This actually looks pretty good, if we go over here it's a little too much. The center square represents no settings at all, so when you click on the center square, you're kind of back at where you were, but we'll apply that, that actually looks very good. Now we could try, if we wanted we could play with lighting, but I think Gamma Correction in this particular case, is exactly what we needed. Let's take a look at the second clip, what we need to fix on the second clip isn't quite as obvious. This deals more with color temperature.

Now color temperature is not anything to do with how hot or how warm the scene is, but it has to do with the color of light, so the spectrum of light in your own home, when you're lit with incandescent lights, most of the time, they're at the lower end of the spectrum, so the color tends to be a little more yellow, a little more red, and as you go outside in the peak of the day, the sun is at the top of the sky, the temperature is a lot higher, the color temperature, it goes more into the blue range, right? The higher end, the blue range.

Well it looks like maybe the photographer, the videographer who shot this video had it set up for daytime color temperature, and this, now the sun is setting, and now we're starting to get a little more yellow and a little more red into the picture. It's not real obvious, it's very subtle, but once we correct it, we should be able to see how much of an improvement correcting it actually makes. So with this clip selected on the timeline, make sure you select the correct clip, remember the application or the adjustments are always going to be applied to whatever clip is selected, so even if your play head is here, if you've got this clip selected, you're going to be making changes to that clip.

So let's select the correct clip, and let's try one of the color corrections here. No, let's not try a color correction, let's go down here and try Temperature and Tint because we're actually dealing with color temperature, let's see what changing the color temperature does to this video. Try this thumbnail, how about this one, this one might be a little too blue, this one over here is just about perfect. So, look at the before and after, I'm just gonna disable this for a moment. This is the before, this is the after.

You see what a difference changing the color temperature made in correcting the color of that picture, so this is now a very nice video with beautiful, on-the-nose color temperature. If color temperature didn't work, we could have played with tint, we could have gone up here and selected red, green, or blue and tried some of those adjustments also. Color temperature was right on the nose for this particular clip now. By the way, once you apply an adjustment to a clip, notice that you get a little indicator on here, a little green dot next to whatever adjustments you made.

We've got a final clip on the timeline, this one it may not be so obvious but this one is an issue with audio and in fact, I'm gonna go up here to the tools menu at the top and I'm gonna select audio mixer and you'll see when we play this clip, it's barely going to register any audio, in fact if you look at the clip you can see it has just a very small wave form on the clip itself. So let's play the clip, and you'll see how much it registers there on the meter. (audio plays) Now we ideally want our audio registering between negative six and zero, this is way down here around negative 30, so we've got to punch it up a little.

Now there are a couple of ways to punch it up, let's move the audio mixer over here, one way would be to raise the volume, right? But raising the volume just kind of amplifies what's already there, I always like to increase the audio gain. Now it's a very subtle difference between the two, but gain has to do with the actual audio on the clip itself. We're going to try to actually increase that level rather than just amplifying the low level audio. So let's go to AudioGain, and when we click apply, a Clip Gain window opens up.

Now let me just close this for a second because you can also get to this by right clicking on a clip, selecting clip, and going over here to AudioGain. You get the same screen. There's a button on here called Normalize, Normalize will automatically set the level for you. Let's try that first, click on Normalize and you can see we've got a lot more action here on our wave form for the audio. Let's play it and we'll watch the audio mixer and see what the levels look like there, so let me reset the play head and click on play.

(audio plays) That is much more like what we would like our audio to be. So let me just close this here, and I just want to concentrate on AudioGain here just for a moment, let's once again reopen AudioGain, clip, Audio Gain, now the automatic setting with Normalize was about 15 decibels, that's pretty high. This was an unusual clip in that the person who shot it clearly didn't intend for you to hear the audio, he was probably shooting B-roll, didn't intend to use the audio at all.

When you're recording, for instance, conversation in a room, quite often the conversation's a little bit low, I generally will try setting between five and ten decibels for the clip gain and you can manually do that just by typing numbers in here, there's five decibels, you can set that to ten decibels, and that's usually enough. You can try Normalize, Normalize might just work fine for you, if you manually need to set it, you can do that too. Just try a couple out and see what gives you the best possible audio, but I love increasing AudioGain rather than simply volume, that just seems to sound much more fuller and much more like, high quality audio than simply making it louder, maybe it's a personal thing with me.

So your adjustments panel here is sort of a master control for correcting and adjusting color and lighting in your video, as well as for enhancing, adjusting, and even cleaning up some of the sound in your audio. Adobe's done a great job here not only making these tools easily accessible, but also with this quick edit interface making it very intuitive to use.