Apply effects to multiple clips using an adjustment layer

Learn how to use adjustment layers for color grading, effects, and quick style changes.

Published January 12, 2026

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Adding creative video effects is an exciting part of changing the look and feel of your footage in Premiere.

But what if you want to adjust the look of an entire scene or multiple scenes?

When you'd like to affect many clips at once, Adjustment Layers are a great option.

Let's take a look.

I have my Jellyfish sequence here, and I'd like to give it a nice, dreamlike quality.

00:22

Apply color grading to an adjustment layer

So, let's first create a supersaturated color treatment.

I'm going to come to my New Item button, and then choose Adjustment Layer.

And by default, it perfectly matches my sequence settings, so I'll say OK.

Then, I'm going to drag and drop my Adjustment Layer onto V2, and then trim it out over all of the clips that I would like to effect.

One thing about my sequence, I've added this Ocean background music to mine.

You can find your own background music by searching in the Essential Sound panel and then dragging and dropping into your project.

But it's not necessary for the learning.

Now it's time to add an effect.

This could include either standard video effects or color correction effects.

To create my supersaturated look, I'm going to select my Adjustment Layer and then go to my Lumetri Color toolset, and I'll just make some basic adjustments in Basic Correction.

So I'm going to bring up my Saturation, and my Exposure, and my Contrast, and I'll also bloom my Whites a little bit.

Here is the before and after on that.

I'll just play a few seconds here.

So you can see that that look has been applied to all of the clips in my sequence.

That's really convenient as you're creating treatments, but it's also great as you're modifying them.

Let's say my client asks me to try something really creative and dramatically adjust all of my blue hues to a deep purple.

Well, I can do that in one step with an Adjustment Layer.

I'm just going to come down to my Curves category, and then in my Hue Saturation Curves, I'm going to go to my Hue vs Hue curve.

And because all of the water is the same color, I'm going to sample that water by clicking on this Eyedropper, and we'll sample the blue.

Then I'm going to take my blue node here and I'm going to drag down until it's the shade of purple that I want.

Notice I can go to pink or red, or I can go up to green, but let's go to maybe around that color there.

And then as I scrub through, you can see that all of my water is purple.

I can keep going.

Let's add another effect.

I'm going to go to my Effects panel.

02:50

Add effects to your adjustment layer

And I'd like to add a lighting effect.

I'm going to come to Video Effects and Lights & Blurs.

The one that I would like to try out is this one here: Volumetric Rays.

So I'm just going to drag and drop this on the Adjustment Layer.

And here in my Effect Controls panel, if I scroll down, you can see that here’s my Lumetri Color effect that I added earlier, and then here is my Volumetric Rays.

There are many parameters here that I can adjust, but this one comes with this Surprise Me!

button which I like to use, and it's just going to randomly adjust these parameters.

I'm going to click it until I like the look.

I think that one's interesting.

Let's see how it looks on the rest of the shots.

We have these rays coming off of the jellyfish.

Again, I'll play a few seconds here.

Not bad.

Now I'm going to come back over to my Project panel because I want to show you another neat thing about Adjustment Layers.

03:59

Showcase multiple looks with different adjustment layers

Let's say that this is one look that we're trying out.

Let's create another one.

I'm going to take that same Adjustment Layer and then drag it over to V3 and trim it out.

I'll turn off my V2, and now let's work on creating a treatment on V3.

I'm going to do this very quickly, so let's just come up to my Creative category.

I'm just going to choose a look from this list.

I'm going to choose SL Bleach HDR, and I'll bump up my Intensity a little bit, and I'll play through this.

So now, if my client wants to see the looks that I've created, I can say, "Well, here's option one and here's option two."

That's Adjustment Layers - a great way to affect the look of multiple clips at once, which can add a lot of added flexibility, speed, and creativity.

What you’ll learn

Apply color grading to an adjustment layer

Place an adjustment layer above your clips and apply color changes to it to affect all clips below at once.

Add effects to your adjustment layer

Apply effects to an adjustment layer to control multiple clips at once. Customize the effect as usual, and every clip beneath the layer will be affected.

Showcase multiple looks with different adjustment layers

Stack multiple adjustment layers, each with its own style. Toggle their visibility to quickly switch between looks.

Instruction and footage by: Ashley Kennedy

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General information

Cookies are small text files stored by your web browser when you use websites. There are also other technologies that can be used for similar purposes like HTML5 Local Storage, web beacons, and embedded scripts. These technologies help us do things like remembering you and your preferences when you return to our sites, measure how you use the website, conduct market research, and gather information about the ads you see and interact with.

If enabled:

We can improve your experience by tailoring the site and the content to things we think might be of interest
We can better keep track of your preferences — like what language you prefer to use
We will better understand your likely interests so we can provide you more relevant Adobe ads and content on non-Adobe websites and in non-Adobe apps
It will help us improve the performance of our website and those of our partners who use the Adobe Experience Cloud

If disabled:

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View transcript

What you’ll learn

Apply color grading to an adjustment layer

Add effects to your adjustment layer

Showcase multiple looks with different adjustment layers