how to take what you already know in Photoshop and use it to color grade video (and photos). You can use this technique to make any combination of adjustment layers into a reusable preset that works in Photoshop, Premiere pro, After effects, even Final Cut pro. This magic happens though LUTS.

If you are only working on images (or video) in Photoshop, this is still relevant to you. (And you can use the tutorial)  However, check out this workflow: We will start with a video in Premiere (if you don’t have one, Ill show you how to get one). We will grab a frame, send it to Photoshop, apply our adjustments in Photoshop. Then, we will take those adjustments and send them to Premiere pro and apply them to the video. Yup! That’s right, you can use Photoshops tools to color grade a video in Premiere Pro!

• PhotoshopCAFE LUT
• Download the source Video (Bridge) here

Written steps coming soon!

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Use Photoshop Tools to Color Grade a Video in Premiere Pro

Cinematic Color Grading

Good day Cafe Crew. It’s Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE and I’ve got something really cool for you this week.

Imagine you’re working in video and you’re in Premiere Pro. Maybe you’re not that experienced in Premiere Pro but you’re really experienced in Photoshop and you want to take the knowledge that you have from Photoshop to do color correction in Premiere.

So what if we can take a video, grab a still frame from there, bring that frame into Photoshop, do the adjustments you would like, and then apply it directly to the video inside Premiere Pro. I’m going to show you how to do that with this little technique that I’ve come up with, which is really great.

All right, so the first thing we want to do, though, is we want to grab some footage. So here we are inside of Premiere Pro and you could use your own footage or you could do what I’m about to show you here. Let’s choose the Libraries workspace and, of course, you could just down under Window here and open the Libraries panel.

What we’re going to do is we’re actually going to grab a video clip from Adobe Stock and bring it directly into Premiere Pro without ever leaving Premiere. So let’s choose under here, see where I would just choose a library, and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to search Adobe Stock. So we’re going to type in the word “Travel” and notice under here, this little option that you can open up.

Make sure it’s set to video and now it’s going to display only the videos and no photos. So when you’re looking for a video that we can use, let’s go down and we can actually hover scrub over here and we can see what it’s going to look like. You know what? I love it. Let’s just grab this, so we’re just going to choose that little option to save the preview into our Library.

What we need to do is choose the resolution. We can do 4K or HD. I’m going to choose HD just for the sake of time and notice what’s happening right now. It’s downloading it into Adobe Stock. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to change our workspace now. I’m going to go into the Editing Workspace and I do want that library, so I’m just going to go in here in the Library and I’m just going to drag it up into here for now.

And we can see there’s our library and we can see it’s downloading our asset. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to click on the Project here and there’s our Project folder. And in order to create something inside of Premiere, we just need to just double click there and we can grab our footage. If you’re working with your own videos and you want to apply these adjustments to those, go ahead and do that, or you can grab the one here from Adobe Stock and we’re just going to click and drag from our library into here.

And, now, you can see it’s downloading it right now. It says “Waiting.” It’s downloading. You can see it’s almost done. And then, now that it’s fully downloaded, you can see that it’s right there. Great! So what I’m going to do now is I’m just going to reset my workspace because I don’t need to look into there anymore, so we’re just going to Reset to Saved work, and there we go.

So what we can do is just click and drag into the timeline and it will create the timeline and you can play this back right now. So there we go, we’ve got this aerial footage right now that we grabbed from Adobe Stock. Now we can apply all the adjustments we want. We can work with this directly here and in fact, if you want to play around and you want to experiment, you can get this watermarked version for free.

In fact, you can grab anything from Adobe Stock for free and start to play around with it if you don’t mind the watermark. You can go ahead and you can practice and you can do different types of things with all kinds of footage. And, also, audition different clips, and then find out what it is you really like. And in the end, if you want to license those, you can do that from Adobe Stock.

Now, here’s the thing, if I go in here and apply all my adjustments and I build my timeline and then I license it, as you’re going to replace it right here in the timeline, you don’t have to re-import it. So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to show you how to license a clip. So what we need to do is we need to just go up back into our Libraries panel here. This is where it’s all going to happen, so there’s our Library panel.

There’s our clip. We’re just going to right click and we’re going to choose to License Video and it’s going to come up with this little window and it’s going to say, “What do you want, a 4K or you want…?” I’m just going to grab the HD and I’m just going to click OK. And now we’re just going to wait for it to download and replace, and there we go.

So that automatically replace his with the unwatermarked version of it so, now, we’ve got this clip right there. So now we’re going to do our color correction trick. Now here’s the thing, you can be doing this on your own footage or you could be doing it on the footage we have here. It doesn’t really matter. You can do it on the licensed or the unlicensed. It’s all going to work the same. So, anyway, let’s go ahead and what we want to do is we want to find a frame, just like a medium frame there that we’re going to use for color correction.

I’m going to go to about here. I think this is a good still frame that I want to grab and bring in to Photoshop. So what we’re going to do is go to this little camera icon and click on the camera icon. A couple of settings you want to change here, make sure you set to TIFF and import into Project. If you don’t turn that on, it’s still going to create that screen capture or that still frame, but it’s not going to import it into your project, so you have to find it on your drive.

It’s still going to save it to the drive, but here, if I click OK, what it’s going to do is we go to our project here. Notice there’s a still frame there; it just imported it directly in there so we don’t have to look for it. All right, so I’m just going to right click now and then we’re going to open this. We’re going to choose to Edit in Adobe Photoshop and boom, here it is inside of Photoshop.

So, now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to apply our Adjustment Layers just like you would work on a photograph. So let’s go in here and let’s look at a couple of adjustments. Why don’t we start off with a Curves Adjustment and let’s have a look. We can look at our highlights. We can pull those in a little bit and I’m going to add some contrast so I’m just going to click and drag down on the Curve a little bit and I’m going to go up here and open up those midtones a little bit. There we go. That’s looking nice, so we can see that before and after.

Let’s see what else we can do. Let’s go to another Adjustment Layer and just for fun, why don’t we do something like let’s play around with maybe a color balance and what we can do is just grab the yellow one, and if we want to like cool it, we can go that way; if we want to warm it, we can go the other way. So, let’s warm it up a little bit. That’s looking kind of nice.

And that’s one of the things that you need to be aware of when you’re working here in the Color Balance. These two can get pretty out of hand, but if you just want to do a basic temperature, the yellow will work really well–the yellow and blue. All right, so we got that going. Let’s see what else we can do. Let’s stack up a few just for fun. Let’s do a Selective Color.

All right, so here’s our Selective Colors and in any of these colors, we can select and like maybe let’s grab the blues and the cyans. We’re going to darken those down a little bit. So what that’s going to do is adjust and punch the sky a little bit, and let’s go into the cyans and do the same thing. Bring it down there and notice it’s punchy. You can see it there like let me show you. We’re adding a little punch there just by moving the blacks.

All right, let’s go to the reds and maybe we’re going to go the other way and just kind of open those up a little bit just to brighten it up. And so we can see, this is what we’ve done here. This is before and here’s after, so we’ve kind of done all these adjustments that we like.

Now, so what I’m going to do now is I’m just going to select them all and I’m going to choose to File, Export and, now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to export this as a LUT. So we’re going to choose Color Lookup Tables and I’m just going to grab a cube will actually work quite well, and I’m just going to click here, and now we’re just going to save this LUT. Let’s just call it “punch.” Okay and then click Save.

All right, we’re now done inside of Photoshop. So let’s go back to Premiere Pro and here we are in Premiere. You could just open the Lumetri panel and that’s what I’m going to do here is Lumetri Color. Let’s just go to the Color and this is going to give us our Lumetri panel right there.

All right, so what we want to do now is we just want to apply that adjustment and we did, so we’re just going to select our clip that we want to work on. This all comes alive. Click under the Basic Correction and put LUT and we’re going to choose Browse. Go into our LUT folder that we created and there’s our Punch Hue and click Open and boom! Look at that.

It applies that and if we have a look at it here, inside of Photoshop–let’s go to Photoshop–you can see, there it is, before and after. Let’s go into Premiere Pro and under Premiere Pro, we can just go here under the Effect Controls. Look at this, before and after, and we can play that video and look at that. We took those exact settings from Adobe Photoshop and we applied them into Premiere Pro.

So you can see how easy it is to take what you know in Photoshop and create this LUT. So the great thing about these LUTs is they can be used in Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects. The same LUTs will work all the way across. Now keep your eye up for some LUTs at PhotoshopCAFE. I’ll be creating some and, in fact, I’ll share this one with you. So look for that link there and you can download this LUT I just created.

And I’ll also give you a link to the video we just worked with. Now, obviously, there’s some great color correction tools right here inside the Lumetri panel in Premiere Pro and I’ll do another tutorial about that at another date. Did you know if you’ve got video sitting there on your hard drive doing nothing, you can actually upload it to Adobe Stock and earn revenue from it and the revenue share is actually quite generous for video?

And if you do want to submit your video to Adobe Stock, it’s really easy to do it right here within Premiere Pro with the publishing options. It also enables you to send your video directly to YouTube, Vimeo and different things like that. Let me show you.

So you’re going to select your sequence. You’re going to choose File, Export, then you go to Media, then the Media window’s going to come up so your video settings, go down to Publish and right here, we can click on there. We could submit this directly to Adobe Stock, so when we choose Export, it’s going to put it right in there. We can also go to Behance, Facebook. We can to an FTP, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, all that stuff we can do directly in here. So, that’s a really useful option to have.

So all right, guys, if you like that tutorial, don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button right now. Become part of the Cafe Crew and then you won’t miss an episode because I’m making a new video at least once a week. If you like this video, smash that Like button. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to say smash; you don’t hit it, you smash it.

So anyway, guys, add a comment, let’s get a discussion going, thanks for watching. Until next time, I’ll see you at the Cafe.

Thanks for watching!

Colin