Premiere & Effects How to Color Correct and Grade in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (Lumetri Scopes, Skin Tone, White Balance) > Adobe Premiere & Effects

 

Hey video editors! Its Premiere gal here
and today I'm giving you the tools I use
to color correct professionally in
Premiere Pro to start I want to make it
clear that you should not be making
adjustments to your images just using
your eyes and guessing your eyes are not
good tools for color you should be using
scopes and yes scopes can be
intimidating at first but actually
they're quite cool and easy to use so
what exactly are we going to be covering
in this tutorial you're going to be
learning how to use Lumetri Color Scopes
Lumetri curves and how to properly
white balance and color correct skin
tone. I also left the timecode a
breakdown of everything I cover in this
tutorial in my description box below
alright so here we are in Premiere Pro
and I have two stock video shots that I
got from Pond5 of just some dancers and
you can see that the images are a bit on
the orange reddish side and they need
some more contrast so the first step to
take is to check the image luminance
which is the brightness levels of the
image to do that we're going to use the
lumetri scopes panel and activate the
luma waveform right now I'm in the color
workspace but if you do not have lumetri
scopes open and you cannot find it go to
window and select lumetri scopes to
visualize the luma waveform click on the
wrench select waveform and from the
waveform type just select luma when I
play the video back you can see that the
luma waveform is moving and it's
literally visualizing the brightness of
the image from the left to the right so
that bright spot up at the top is his
bandanna and also that reflection on his
shoulder is right there in the middle
and you'll also notice that there are
numbers 0 is at the bottom which
represents pure black and a 100 at
the top which is pure white so it's
pretty simple so you may be wondering ok
great but what do I do to make it better
well you basically want to improve the
dynamic range between the light and the
dark in the luma waveform and to do that
you want to make sure that the waveform
is as close to 100 at the top and
is close to zero at the bottom so
there's more contrast and more dynamic
range so to make it closer to these
values let's use the RGB curves from the
lumetri color panel so go ahead and
select the white dot for luma and the
top of the curve here controls the
highlights so click and pull that to the
left to raise up the brightness levels
now you can see that the waveform is
moving up closer to 100
I just want to generally bring the other
levels up so it's brighter now we're
going to do the same with the darks and
the shadows click and drag the line at
the bottom to the right to bring it down
now if I uncheck the curves on and off
you can see that it's much brighter and
more contrast but there's still more
work to do so the next step is white
balance now we're going to turn on the
RGB parade and the vectorscope YUV and
turn off the luma waveform the RGB
parade shows the balance of the reds
greens and blues in the image from left
to right and we want them to be equal in
balance that will mean that it's white
balanced we can see that the red is
higher in the blue is low and you can
see that the image is too red and with
the vectorscope which is just a color
wheel you can see all the colors mark
around the edges here and the
complementary colors are opposite so
that inner line there that's broadcast
safe so you can see that the yellows
need to be brought down because it's
outside that line so I'm going to show
you that later on in this tutorial so
the easiest way to make the RGB more
balance to achieve white balance is to
go to the basic correction tab of the
luma tree color panel and use the white
balance selector to select a pure white
area of the image and you'll see that
I'm just selecting a part of the
bandanna and now the colors are more
balanced but if you don't have an area
of true white that you know in the image
you can also just adjust the individual
colors using the RGB curves from loom
entry just like we did with the luma
waveform so just select the color that
you want from the dots here and then you
can pull it to the left at the top to
bring the color up or pull it to the
right at the bottom of the curve to
bring that color down
until the colors are balanced but now
you may think that the skin tone looks a
tad off and skin tones are tricky just
using your eyes but let me show you how
to use scopes to know that your skin
tone is perfect so first we need to
sample the skin by creating a mask
around an area of the skin using the pen
tool from the opacity controls under
effects controls now we just see that
sample of skin from the program panel
now going back to lumetri scopes from
the RGB parade for skin tone you want
the red to be the highest because guess
what? all humans have red blood under the skin it doesn't matter what color of
skin you're working with we want red to
be first then green and then blue so
this is pretty good but now going over
and looking at the vectorscope we can
see where the skin tone is lying between
yellow and red now we want the
visualization to fall on this line
because that's the skin tone line and it
looks good but we want it to be a little
bit closer to red so to adjust this
angle you need to search for fast color
corrector under the effects and drag it
drop it on your clip
yes premiere is calling this effect
obsolete but it's definitely not and
I'll show you why now let's move the
effects controls panel over to be next
to the luma tree panel so we have more
space and then all scrub down to the
fast color corrector and here we can use
the hue angle which is just the color
angle to adjust where the line falls on
that vectorscope and you can see that
when I move the angle now that white
visualization and the vectorscope is
moving and here we just want to make the
hue angle fall directly in between the
yellow and the red so it's more balanced
now if I turn off the skin mask and I
turn off the lumetri color effect and
the fast color corrector you can see
what it looked like before and after and
now it's starting to look really good so
Adobe if you're watching definitely get
the hue angle adjustment in Lumetri
because it's definitely not obsolete the
last thing I wanted to point out is that
you can see here that the yellow is
still a bit far outside the broadcast
safe circle so to reduce that let's use
the hue/saturation curves to just draw
points and drop the yellow down so it's
not so bright and as I do that you can
see that the yellow visualization
actually moved under the broadcast safe
line so we're good to go and then if you
need to add some more vibrancy which I
like to do under the creative tab you
can just increase the vibrancy let's say
to about 20 and now under effects
controls if I turn all the effects on
and off you can see what it looked like
before and after and then to copy these
same effects to the other clip I have
here in the timeline just right-click on
the clip select copy and then right
click on the second clip and select
paste attributes and here I can paste
just the lumetri color and the fast
color effects to this new clip you still
may need to make some slight adjustments
but it's looking pretty good thanks so
much for watching you all and to
continue supporting my effort to make
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watching you all stay creative and click
on other videos to learn something new,
Bye!