How to use the Lumetri panel in Premiere Pro to color grade your video.

This 11 minute mini course teaches you how to work with the appearance of your video.

Go from LOG to full color and cinematic color grade.

Understand and work with vectorscopes and lumetri scopes

Use the color wheels in Premiere Pro 2018

Create and use your own custom LUTS

I hope this video tutorial helped you understand how to color grade your videos and that it will help you get better looking videos.

Check out all the other free tutorials here at PhotoshopCAFE

COLOR GRADE mini COURSE. Premiere pro LOG, vector Scopes, LUTS explained

Hey Cafe Crew, it’s Colin Smith here from Photoshop Cafe and today, I am going to show you how to color grade video footage inside of Premier Pro.

Alright, so the footage that I am going to use is actually shot on a C200, a Canon C200 and I have shot in a log format. So I am actually going to show you how to convert that and do all the color grading used in lumetri panel inside of Premier.

So we are just going to double click here to get our footage in. so my goal with this is actually use it to submit it to Adobe Stock. So I am going to do another tutorial where I am going to show you the whole process of submitting a video to Adobe Stock but for now, we are going to focus on getting that footage and color grading it. So we have got a 4K footage here and all we need to do to bring it in the timeline here, is just drag it into the New icon right there and if we hit the Backslash key, we can pull it up and there’s our footage right there and in fact, if we go up and look at the sequence settings, under the Sequence settings, we can see that there we go, we have got the 4K right there which is Ultra HD, click OK. Now if we hit the Space bar, we can play this back and then you can hear, we have an audio track. There’s actually 4 tracks of audio as you can see on here. The bottom two don’t have anything happening, just the track 1 and 2 have the audio. You can see that by the wave form.

Now, we could choose to eliminate that if we held down the Alt key or the Option key, we can click and I am going to Shift Click there to select the two tracks that don’t have audio and then we can just right click and choose to just Clear. The other thing we could do is just hit the Delete key. Now if you want to get rid of the audio entirely, do the same thing. If you click here, it is going to select both the video and the audio and we can see that’s because they are linked. We can choose to unlink but the fastest way to select them is to hold down Alt or Option. And you can see we can select those different elements individually. I am going to show you how to do that color grading right now.

So here we go. We have got it and what we want to do now is we want to open this inside the Lumetri panel. So one of the things we could do is we could just go to the Color workspace and then just let’s do that right now and we are just going to reset it and this will take it right back, this is what it looks like when you first opened it. And we can see right there, there is our Lumetri color panels here. Now one of the things you can do is you can use an input Lut where you can literally go in here and you can create a lut and I do that a lot of the times because we kind of want it to go about 7 or 9, if you want to be technical. But what I am going to do is, I am going to show you how to do the whole thing without a Lut and then we will actually save our own Lut at the end and our Lut is simply a preset.

So one of the things we do want to do is we do want to look at our scopes. So we are going to click on Lumetri Scopes and you will notice there are two scopes that’s showing right now. If we right click, we can see we have got a Vector Scope here and a Parade. A Vector Scope is what we see here and we have got another one that we can do to is the Hue and Lightness and Saturation. You can see that one there as well. We are just going to close that one down and we are going to focus with this. This is actually going to show our Saturation. As long as we are inside this little space here, the image or the video is not over-saturated. Once we start going outside of here, that’s too much saturation and we can be seeing problems. You can see the different colors here, we have got red, green, blue etcetera. So we can see magenta, all these little blocks represent those colors. But the one, we are really going to focus on here is the RGB Parade. So there is our red, green and blue. And this is actually what we are seeing in the image, kind of representing that, here is our highlights, up at 100 and our Shadows, down at 0 and as you have noticed because I have shot this in a Log format, it is a very flat image which means that there’s lot of dynamic range in there and lots of detail and we can color grade it now and bring that detail out. So you could just a good part of the clip but because this is pretty much the same, it doesn’t really matter where I am, just make sure that clip is selected.

Now, the next thing you want to do is we want to go down here and we are going to go to our color wheels. And notice, we have got Shadows, Mid-tones and Highlights. So essentially if we pull down here, we are going to darken our Shadows and as we do that, watch what’s happening, right there on our Parade. Notice on the Parade there we are now going down and that’s moving to the bottom. So this is our Shadows. Okay, let’s try our Highlights. Let’s increase this. And it is going to stretch this out, now sometimes, you will find in a case like this, there’s just not enough latitude for moving these sliders. So let me just double click these sliders to reset them and we are going to go to the Basic Correction and what we want to do is the first thing we want to do is we just going to push the Contrast up a little bit. And as we increase this contrast, notice how it spreads that out a little bit. And in fact, we are going to pull that up a little, just to kind to bring it near the middle. So this is a good starting place.

Alright, so let’s go back to our color wheels. Now, we can pull our highlights up. Now, if you want to speed this part, just hold down the Shift key and you can actually move it much faster. So you can see, we can pull this up quite high there, without losing anything. Let’s do the same thing with the shadows here. And you will see like if it goes over like that, then that means it is starting to [Inaudible 05:42]. So we want to kind of pull it up to about there. Now I know [Inaudible 05:45] packman looking thing and we might even increase the mid-tones a little bit. So let’s push our mid-tones up a little bit more to around about the 50. And you can see these here representing our mid-tones and there’s about 50 IRE right there.

Alright, so you can see it is definitely looking a lot more contrast than there was before. Now you can see the colors are little bit skewed here. You will notice there’s an excess of blue here in the highlights and red, they are in the shadows. So we could go back to our basic correction here and we can play around with this and pull it down a little bit. And what that’s doing, notice how that starts to even up a little bit. That’s giving a little bit more even in the colors. So you can see that they match a little bit more and we can play around with these a little bit more here as well. Maybe I want to recover a little bit in the highlights, not too much, open up a little in the shadows. Now we need to bring that back and we can do that for the blacks and the whites. So let’s take that black all the way to 0 which we are seeing here and let’s increase our white. Let’s push that white all the way up, stopped about there. And give it a bit more contrast again and now, look at the scopes there. Things are looking a lot better. In fact, the saturation is not bad there. I could just give it a little touch of saturation and take it right up to that edge there if we wanted to go pretty saturated, in fact, let’s bring it back a little bit, little much.

And so, we are looking at that footage now, let’s have a look and see how it is looking like before and after. So what we do is we just going to go under our Effect Control, under the Effect Control turn the Lumetri Color off. That’s what it looked like before, very, very flat and there, now we have got a very high contrast and punchy. So this is kind of like a clean grade. However, you know, I might want to pull the contrast down a little bit. Because there’s a little bit of atmosphere there in the morning. So I am going to let it go down a bit and get a little bit more foggy, so it just kind of looks a little more, little more style. There we go. So it has a little bit more of a mood there and we Tare even going to pull these [Inaudible 07:54] down a little bit more. Let’s pull those down and then if you look at our scopes here, we can see, it is still within our range, we might be clipping the black just a little bit but that’s quite okay. Alright, so if we want to preview this, we can just select it and hit the Tilde key and that will go full screen and now, we can see it a lot better and there’s our footage. You can see that’s looking a lot better. Now there’s a lot of different things we can do with this, let me just hit the Tilde key to go back. So another thing we could do is we could stylize this and we could do this using the Creative Tab here. So here is our Creative Tab and this is where we can do some stylization. So if we want to give it a little faded film look, we could do that. See how that kind of just gives us that kind of look. You don’t want to sharpen it too much, particularly, if you are going to be going and submitting it to Stock and in fact, what we are doing here is we are doing the saturation.

Let’s go back to the Basic Correction, we are going to reset that saturation, keep your eye on there. But what we want to do is do the creative because when we are in here and we use the vibrance that actually works better, see how that vibrance giving a much better result there than using the saturation effect? Let’s pull it back. It is getting a little heavy handed with that and see how we are right on the edge there. So it is looking good.

Now, if you want to do more of the blockbuster look, you know where we have got the tilts and the shadows and the yellows and the highlights, we can do that by clicking here and dragging down towards the [Inaudible 09:20] a little bit, hit the Shift key, it enables us to move this very quickly. I am just going to give it a light color grade. And let’s go in here and push it up a little bit to warm up those highlights. And now we can see, you know, we have really done quite a lot to this. Let’s have a look at it. In fact, why don’t we just click and drag this out a little bit and notice how we can give ourselves a little more space. Let’s go into effect control and we can look at it, before and after. You can see that we have created a pretty cool look. Now we can save this out as a lut. Just go back to the basic correction up here and we are just going to click at the top here and we are going to export a cube.

So let’s do that right now, we are going to export that cube and we will create a folder here, we will call it Lut and I am just going to call this one C200 Morning and we are going to hit Save. Okay, so this means if I go to another piece of footage like let’s take this again and I will show you and then we look at it and see how it is kind of washed out like that and we want to apply that same look, we just simply go under here, under the Lut, now I am doing the input Lut, we could go there or we could go under Creative and we are just going to click on Browse. And as you can see, C200 Morning that we created, click Open and boom! You can see right there, that we can just apply that Lut to all the similar looking footage and then we don’t have to go through the whole process every single time for doing that.

So, anyway, maybe you want to contribute your videos to Adobe Stock, make some extra income, get them off your hard drive, put them into circulation where people can start using them. Check out that link underneath to become a contributor, I will also drop a link there where you can get 10 free images from Adobe Stock.

So if you liked this tutorial, smash that Like button into dust. So why don’t you drop a comment and let me know what gear you are using, I would love to know what you are shooting and what you are shooting with. And also, if you are not a subscriber, hit the subscribe button right now, become part of the Cafe Crew, get a new tutorial, every single week.

So until next time, I will see you, at the Cafe.

Become an Adobe Stock Contributor: https://adobe.ly/2qdDFRH
10 free images from Adobe Stock https://adobe.ly/2pnpTe4

Thanks for watching

Colin

2 responses to “How to Color Grade video in Premiere Pro Lumetri, mini course”

1. very informative post.

   Reply

2. nice colin
   good luck =)

   Reply

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