Video Color Correction in Adobe Premiere Pro: 10 Easy Steps | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Basic video col­or grad­ing is very sim­i­lar to pho­to col­or grad­ing, so if you’re famil­iar with Light­room, it’s very easy. Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Video pro­cess­ing in a video edit­ing pro­gram begins with col­or cor­rec­tion. In this arti­cle, we will tell you what you need to know about basic col­or grad­ing in Adobe Pre­miere Pro.

Basic color correction and grading

Col­or grad­ing is an impor­tant part of video edit­ing. There are two main steps in col­oriz­ing a video: col­or cor­rec­tion and grad­ing.

Col­or cor­rec­tion (Col­or cor­rec­tion) is the process of obtain­ing a “cor­rect” pic­ture with­out block­ing in the shad­ows, with the cor­rect white bal­ance, suit­able con­trast, etc., that is, the process is more tech­ni­cal.

Grad­ing (Col­or grad­ing) is already an artis­tic “col­or­ing” of the video in col­ors in accor­dance with the idea, in order to give a spe­cial mood and atmos­phere. Let us recall, for exam­ple, the green “Matrix” of the Wachows­ki sis­ters (ex-broth­ers).

For grad­ing, you first need to do tech­ni­cal col­or cor­rec­tion. We will talk about it today.

Video Color Correction: 10 Steps

Here’s a still from a video tak­en with the wrong col­or tem­per­a­ture. The mate­r­i­al is clear­ly “bluish” and slight­ly under­ex­posed.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 1: Load the video in Pre­miere Pro and open the tab col­or in the top pan­el, which opens the pan­el to us Lumetri Col­or (Col­or Lumetri).

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 2: Open a tab Basic Cor­rec­tion in the pan­el Lumetri Col­or (Col­or Lumetri) — it con­tains the basic options for cor­rect­ing our video.

Pho­tog­ra­phers who have worked with Adobe Light­room or Cam­era Raw will see famil­iar set­tings. In gen­er­al, the log­ic of video and pho­to col­or cor­rec­tion is the same.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 3: Since the footage is bluish, we need to cor­rect the Col­or Tem­per­a­ture. To do this, we use the pipette in the sec­tion White Bal­ance to the right of the inscrip­tion Show Mask (Show Mask). Click on the eye­drop­per, and then select some­thing as close to white as pos­si­ble in the frame, for exam­ple, the han­dle of a cup.

Choos­ing a pipette… Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photosklad.Expert

… and poke at the cup.Illustration: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

The col­or tem­per­a­ture will be adjust­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly, but we can fine-tune it man­u­al­ly using the slid­er. Tem­per­a­ture in the same sec­tion White Bal­ance. Move the slid­er Tem­per­a­ture to warmer tones (orange part) or cool­er tones (blue part) until areas in your frame that should be white are as close to white as pos­si­ble.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 5: Now that we’ve evened out the white bal­ance a bit, let’s play with the slid­er Expo­sure (Expo­sure)to increase or decrease the over­all bright­ness of the image. Since the mate­r­i­al looks under­ex­posed, move the slid­er to 0.9.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

In the result­ing pic­ture, I don’t like high­lights and bright areas — they stand out too much. In order to com­pen­sate for this, let’s slight­ly reduce the para­me­ter High­lights (Glare)off­hand to -7.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 6: With slid­er Shad­ows (Shad­ows), we can dark­en or light­en the dark­est parts of the video with­out affect­ing the light­est parts. Increas­ing the val­ue allows you to pull out the details in the shad­ows, mak­ing them a lit­tle lighter. To bet­ter see the tex­ture of the wood of the shelf, we will light­en the shad­ow parts a lit­tle by set­ting the slid­er Shad­ows (Shad­ows) on the 7.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

We rec­om­mend not to set the para­me­ter Shad­ows (Shad­ows) high­er scores 30–40as this can great­ly increase the dig­i­tal noise in your video.

Step 7: And now we will twist the con­trast using the slid­er of the same name — Con­trast (Con­trast). Decreas­ing the set­ting makes the image more “fad­ed” — the dark areas of the image become much lighter.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Increas­ing the con­trast, on the oth­er hand, makes the image dark­er.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

For our video, the opti­mal con­trast will be about 12.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 8: To increase the detail of the wall­pa­per in the back­ground, decrease the val­ue Whites (White) before -ten.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Step 9: Now decrease the expo­nent Blacks (Black) before -5to make the dark­est parts of the image deep black.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

What’s the Dif­fer­ence Blacks (Black) from Shad­ows (Shad­ows)? Slid­er black best used if you need to make your video dark­er and the slid­er Shad­ows best for pulling details out of shad­ows and high­lights. The slid­er itself Shad­ows does not give such a deep and high con­trast pic­ture as set­ting the para­me­ter black.

In any case, the best way to tune is by eye. Do not be afraid to exper­i­ment with the pic­ture and select the appro­pri­ate com­bi­na­tion of para­me­ters using the “sci­en­tif­ic poke method”.

Step 10: At the end we will change the para­me­ter Sat­u­ra­tion (Sat­u­ra­tion), which seri­ous­ly changes the whole pic­ture. When the para­me­ter is set to 0you remove all col­ors from the video, result­ing in a mono­chrome image.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Installing Sat­u­ra­tion (Sat­u­ra­tion) on the 200, all col­ors become more sat­u­rat­ed and acidic in places. Increas­ing the para­me­ter should be approached with cau­tion, as it can increase noise and break all pre­vi­ous col­or cor­rec­tion at once. When installed on 200the pic­ture takes on a dis­tinct yel­low­ish tint.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

For my video, the sat­u­ra­tion val­ue in the area is suit­able 133.

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

Basic col­or cor­rec­tion is ready. Com­pare with the orig­i­nal:

Illus­tra­tion: Geor­gy Georgiev, Photostore.Expert

It’s not per­fect, but it looks much bet­ter. Recall that basic col­or cor­rec­tion is the first, but nec­es­sary, step in post-pro­cess­ing col­or in a video. Depend­ing on your needs, you can stop at this point or con­tin­ue to Col­or Grad­ing your video to get the col­or scheme you want.