How to Color Correct Your Video in Adobe Premiere Pro 2022

Color correct video in Premiere Pro. Learn to use the Lumetri Color panel along with Lumetri Scopes. Learn to use the Color Wheels in the Lumetri Panel to dial in your adjustment. Follow the easy steps and incorporate them into your video color correction workflow.

Color Correct Video in Premiere Pro

In this video, I’m going to show you steps to color, correct your video. Adobe Premiere Pro you will be using the Lumetri color panel along with some of the Lumetri scopes. So why are we using Lumetri scopes?

The Lumetri scopes help us to get our colors and black and white levels correct. Also, they help so you’re not relying on your eyes alone to make adjustments. So when talking about color correction, we’re talking about exposure, contrast, and color balance.

I’m sure you’ve heard the word color grading. That’s something you probably want to do after you color correct, and color grading is a little bit more in the creative process. So we’re going to go through a couple of steps to get you through color correcting.

Using the Luma Waveform with Color Wheels

And the first step should be to adjust your blacks and whites or your contrast. So I’m in the editing workspace right now, and to do my color correction, I’m going to come up here to where says color. And click on that and the window on the top.

I want to make sure my new Lumetri color, my Lumetri scopes, is checked in here. I don’t have any Lumetri scopes open right now, so that’s why this window is blank. So first, we’re going to adjust something called the Luma.

That’s the brightness of your clip, and we’re going to use something called the waveform scope. If I right-click on this window where the Lumetri scopes is, but come down to waveform type and click on Luma and there is my Luma Waveform on the left, you have your scale from zero to 100 up somewhere near 100 up

here. You see your brightness and your highlights. They don’t need to be all the way up to 100, somewhere around 80 to 90 down here. Close to zero is where your shadows are going to be. Skin tones are somewhere around 60 to 70, so that’s looking at the scope vertically.

So if we look at the scope horizontally, it matches the clip as it goes from left to right. So if I play this, you can see the movement in this clip. And as she’s lifting her head right there, you can see that right here at the top, there is more brightness or there are highlights.

And that’s right at the top of her head. Another example of this is where we have a parade and the ladies are marching there in the shadow of these buildings. You can see the clip moving. All of a sudden the scene changed and part of them are marching into the sun at the top of your Luma WaveForm

, the brightness and contrast it all the way up there to 100. So this is an example of something that we will adjust. But this is one reason that you should look at the entire clip to see if you find spots like this where all of a sudden we’re in bright sunlight.

Now we’re going back into the shadows, seeing the waveform. Everybody’s in shadow. So here’s the first clip we’re going to work with, and we’re going to use our Luma Waveform. And you can see that this image very flat.

In a sign of lack of contrast, the Luma Waveform only goes from 20 to 60. So you want to stretch that Luma Waveform across a dynamic range. So there are a couple of different ways that you can make this adjustment.

You can use the exposure contrast highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks over here in a tone. You can use these RGB curves over here, but we are going to use something called a color wheel. And we’re going to use a color wheel in combination with some of these exposure controls.

I like using the color wheels. They give a good representation of your adjustment. And if you use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, you see these similar color wheels in there too. So here we go. We’re going to adjust our luma, which is our brightness.

We’re going to use the waveform scope here and it is set at Luma. The first thing that would be good to do is come over here to the tone and the saturation, take the saturation all the way down. That’s going to help us see our luma better.

If you want to bring your saturation back to where it was, just double click on the adjustment that puts it back to where it was and take all the saturation out of going to come down to the color wheels.

We’re going to bring our shadows down, and you could see that the shadows are starting to come down on our waveform, bring up the highlights, and then you can bring up the mid-tones. And mid-tone adjustments it’s kind of more like a feel, and sometimes you have to go back and forth between your adjustments because they

affect each other. And I’m going to play with the mid-tones there a little bit. And as you see, I’m scrubbing through the clip, then come back to my basic correction and double click on my saturation. And bring up the saturation more.

So here is the adjustment with just the color wheels. There is the before and there’s the after. Then I can come back into the basic correction if I want and I could bring down the black levels and the Luma Waveform is coming down towards zero could adjust my whites and I’m starting to spread this out more

across the dynamic range. I could bring up highlights a little bit, a little bit of contrast, a little bit exposure and then bring up my saturation. And that’s about where I would have this clip. So you can use both together.

Start off with the color wheel and you can come back into the basic correction if needed. We started out with a clip that was really flat, had no contrast in it. That’s why we had to go to extremes to make all these adjustments.

It’s an example here of the parade. I would come to the color wheels indefinitely, bring down my highlights and maybe just the mid-tones a little bit, and then go through and see how it looks can bring up the shadows a little bit.

But here I’ve taken care of that area. Were they all of a sudden going into the sun. You see, the highlights are up here. Around 90 was before and there’s after. So to adjust your luma in your clip, bring up the Lumo Waveform.

And with the color, we’ll start off by bringing the shadows down, then use the highlights color. We’ll bring the highlights up with the play head and the clip. Look for areas on the waveform. It is near 100. You don’t want it up that high.

If there’s a face in your clip, you want it about 70%. And you submit tones, color, wheel for mood and based on feel to see how it looks. Do me a favor. Hit that like button. It really helps the channel.

I appreciate it. So now I want to check our video clips for color balance or color cast. So now we’re going to dial in our chroma values. Very important to go through and check your luma values before checking your Chroma values.

Using the Vectorscope and RGB Parade to Adjust Color Balance

I made an extreme example here of this color cast. You can make overall adjustments by the temperature and tint controls over here in the basic correction temperature control that you adjust the Chroma along the blue and orange spectrum, and the tint control lets you adjust to chroma along with the magenta and green spectrum.

But we’re going to use our color wheels and our color wheels are going to let us dial in the Chroma or shadows mid-tones and highlights adding or subtracting chroma values from these luma ranges. And for this, we’re going to use the vectorscope while YUV.

If I right-click here in the Lumetri scopes and go to Vector Scope YUV and I’m going to right-click again because I’m going to remove our Luma Waveform. So we just see our vectorscope and right-click again.

Because of this brightness right here, I want to make sure that it’s on bright. So there’s normal. I want to be able see it better. So I’m going to go down here to brightness and click on Bright. So we’re going to use our vectorscope to adjust the mid-tones with our color wheel in.

If I click in the middle of my mid-tones color wheel right here and move it around, you could see my vector scope moving. And as you go around, this vectorscope is yellow, red, magenta, blue, cyan, and green.

So are values in this clip are pushing towards the green. So this is pretty saturated with green. Values near the center are less saturated and saturation increases outward, so most of our skin tones are in the mid-tones.

That’s why we’re using the mid-tone color wheel. I’m going to take this the opposite way of green to magenta, and as I move towards magenta, you can see that all my values are starting to shift my vectorscope. If I come back into basic correction, if I move my saturation slider, my values start coming in too much saturation

there, so I’ll still bring it down now that we’ve used our vectorscope to adjust the mid-tones. Let’s move on to another scope called RGB Parade, and we’re going to use the RGB parade to remove the rest of the color cast going to right-click and click RGB Parade and click on my vector scope because I

want to close that in highlight that. And here’s my RGB parade. When you use the RGB parade, you’re removing the color cast from the neutral colors in the image. So this shows the red, green, and blue in this clip, and if they’re not equal, you have a color cast now to adjust for these chroma problems.

You’ll use the shadows and the highlight color wheel. So now if you look at your RGB parade in this clip, I’m going to have to increase the Blues in order to remove the rest of the color cast. And this is going to be in the highlights if I click on my highlights color wheel and move this around

,you see my blue start to come up. I might add that if you want to reset your color wheel, you just double click on your point and it goes back to the start. So I’m going to pull my blues up as high as it’ll go something like that.

And if I need to, I can go back to my mid-tones and change that and I can go back and forth and try to get my skin tones and my RGB parade as close as possible. So here is the before and here’s the after and that is color balance using your vectorscope and your RGB parade.

If I go back to this image where there was no real obvious color cast, if I go back to the vectorscope, YUV looks like the mid-tones are starting to point out to cyan. If I take the cyan and go the opposite way, if I click on my mid-tones color wheel, you could see

the movement on my vectorscope. It’s a small move. There’s the before and there’s after. You can see it adds a little bit more red and come back to basic color correction and I can bring my saturation down a little bit.

You see, there’s the saturation changing, OK, before there’s the after the come back to the color wheels and I remove the vectorscope and there’s still a little bit more red in here. You see at the top in the highlights, so I click on my highlights.

The color wheel in the opposite of red is cyan. If you look at the RGB parade, I’m bringing down my reds because I’m moving towards cyan. And here’s the before you see the RGB parade. The Reds are way up near 100 more than the green and the blue, and here is the after.

So that was an example. There wasn’t real obvious there was a color cast, but there was, and we adjust the mid-tones with our vectorscope and then came back to our RGB parade to make sure that our red, green, and blue was equal so that we didn’t have any more color cast.

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Read the previous blog article here ➡️ How To Export Photos From Any Video Using Adobe Photoshop