Adjusting your footage using primary color corrections - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- When it comes to color correction, the first thing that we need to do is a primary color correction to our clips. What this means is that we adjust all of the clip, not just some of the colors. Our main goal when doing this is to assure that the luma levels are correct and that the clip does not have a color cast. Open sequence 3-2 from the project panel. When it comes to color correction, the first thing that we need to do is a primary color correction to our clips. What this means is that we adjust all of the clip, not just some of the colors. Our main goal here is to assure that the luma levels are correct, that is, brightness and contrast, and that the clip does not have a color cast. So, first things first. Let's make sure that our luma is correct, and for that, I need to change my Scope. Click on the wrench and choose Waveform. In this case, it's going to be YC no chroma, because that's the one that we had selected in the previous movie. I don't have the real estate to show both, so I'll click on the wrench again, and I'll deselect the Parade. Just like last time, I feel that we can expand the dynamic range a little bit. Ideally, the maximum dynamic range that we can have for our clips is zero for the darks, and 100 for the brights. However, it really is clip dependent. You can't set each and every clip the same way. I'm going to go into my Lumetri Color Panels, and I'll go to the RGB Curves, and I'll make sure that my luma is selected. That is the white circle here. I'll make the darks a little bit darker. I'll make the brights a little bit darker. And notice that I'm not really doing an S-curve this time. I'll go to the next one and do the same thing. I'll adjust the darks by bringing this control a little bit to the right. Notice that if I do it too much, I start crushing the values here. That is not desirable. A crushed value is a value that lost all color information. So, be careful when making these adjustments. You're almost always better making just a little adjustment than a great deal of change. Let's go into the third clip and let's do the same thing. This one doesn't need much adjustment in the darks, so I think I'm going to leave that alone, and I'll adjust the brights like so. And then the next one, same thing. It doesn't need anything in the darks. If you pay attention, there are already clips that are on that zero line. But I will bring the brights up a tad. Next clip, same thing. Darks can be darker, brights can be brighter. Going on, this one already has some color information lost in the darks, so I think I'm going to bring those darks up a little bit, and now I'm going to bring the brights up as well. Onto the last clip. I have my brights are already where they should be, and I can make my darks a little bit darker. Once I'm done with the luma, I can move on to the chroma, and for that I need my Vectorscope, so I'll choose the Vectorcope YUV, and same thing again. I can't see them both at the same time. I will deselect the Waveform. In here, I find that I can make my colors a little bit more saturated. You can see that my colors are not even near these control points right here in the Vectorscope, so I'll go to the Basic Color Correction, and I'll increase the Saturation a little bit. Go into the next clip. I'll do the same thing. I'll increase the Saturation just a little bit. Going on, I can do the same thing to this one. Be careful, because the ocean is going into the cyan control, and we really don't want to get too far past that. Same thing with the next one. All I'm doing is increasing the Saturation. If we keep on going, this one, just a little bit will do. We can do more to this one. Increase the colors. You can see how the water starts becoming a lot more vibrant. And now, finally, the last one. This is a lot of green grass, so we can't do too, too much here. After we have our colors where we want them, let's go ahead to the RGB Parade. For that, click on the Settings again. Choose RGB. Click once more, and deselect the Vectorscope. Let's start at the beginning. I think we can bring our reds up a little bit, so I'm going to go to the Curves, and I'll select the red channel. I'll just bring it up a tiny little bit. I'll select the blue channel, and I'll bring it down a little bit. Again, the three channels do not need to be the same, especially on a clip like this, where it's obviously so prominently green and blue. Let's go to the next one, and I can bring the red up a tiny little bit in here, and I'll also bring the blue down a tiny little bit. This is a little bit better. Notice that I do need to bring the reds up, but not the top of the red, only the bottom, and for that, I'm going to create a control point right in the middle of the Curve, and now I can move this up a little bit. I can create yet another control point here, and I can bring this up. Notice that this Curve here represents where we are in the Curve, so from the beginning to about halfway of the line, it represents between zero and 50 here on the Scope, so you can bring up or down just sections of your video. I think I'm going to bring this down, and now I can go to my green Curves, and I'll bring this down just a tad, and then finally the blue. I can just do this. Again, you don't need to change these colors too, too much. I think I changed it too much on the red. I'll bring it down a little bit. But you are bringing the colors in balance. Remember, our job on primary color correction is to make sure that there's no color cast in our pixels. Let's go to the next one. And, in here, you can see the green can use a little bit of help, so I'll just bring the green down a tad, and I'll also bring the blue down a tiny little bit. Go into the next one. We see the same thing as we've been seeing. Green and blue are very far from red, so I'm going to go to the green, and I'm going to adjust this dynamic range, by increasing it and making the brights brighter and the darks darker, but just in the green channel. And now in the blue channel, finally, I'm going to make the darks a little bit darker. And as you see, if I exaggerate, you start seeing a yellow color cast, because the opposite of the blue channel is the color yellow. And I think that's pretty good. Let's just do one more. I'll bring the reds up just a little bit, and I'll bring the green down. And the last clip here, not surprisingly, the green channel is very prominent, so I think we're good on the red, and on the green, and all I have to do is bring my blue channel a little bit here, so that my blue channel is not too crushed here at the bottom. Color casts are usually more present in the midtones, so you're going to find yourself working in the middle of the Curve more than anywhere else. I have used a combination of both, the individual clips and the adjustment layers to get my luma levels and my color levels where I need them for neutrality. No color casts.