[Music] [Karl Lee Soule'] Welcome to this session. This is called Get the Look. Color Correction and Grading in Adobe Premiere Pro. For those who don't know who I am, I've been with Adobe for going on 20 years. I've had multiple different roles. My current role is as a Senior Workflow Specialist, based in Los Angeles. I focus on film and television workflows. What's interesting about giving a color class here is a lot of my customers in Los Angeles, they actually try and work in a siloed workflow where it's not often that the editor actually does a lot of color work that's usually done at the end of the process by a different team, maybe using different tools. And part of my job is making sure that you can get stuff out of Premiere and into those other tools effectively so that Premiere can be part of a larger workflow. Now that said, a lot of folks use Premiere Pro for color.
There are a lot of nice tools that are in there. I'm going to go through if you're not familiar with them. I'm going to showcase a number of different tools today.
Something you can look for, I did co-write a guide called the Best Practices Guide for Long-Form Film and Television. That is something that's available to you on the helpx.adobe.com website. But feel free to reach out to me or contact me on LinkedIn is probably the best way.
All right. Who agrees with this statement? Color is easy, right? Color is super easy, right? We've all done Instagram filters. We've all played around maybe in Lightroom mobile, even the Lumetri panel. How many here have already touched and played around with the basics in the Lumetri panel, okay. So...
How many agree with this statement? So what we're looking at here are a number of different color charts. These are designed to map the spectrum of what the human eye can perceive and then show what video can actually show in that. When you're working inside of film and video, you're typically working with a more limited color palette than what the human eye can see. It's getting better. When I started, 601 color is not even on this chart anymore.
If you look on the right-hand side, you'll see what's called 709 color over here. This is what the broadcasters use today.
This is getting into what's called 2020 or 2100 color. Then in the middle here you'll also see this larger triangle and dots that'll come up later, something called ACEScct. So when we talk about a color space, we are talking about the total range of colors that are available. And there's all kinds of math involved to switch from one to another.
It can be painful. Everybody knows this formula down here at the bottom. Oops.
How many here have had a Canon camera and been presented with all of these different shooting modes and go, what do I use? Color is complicated, if you want it to be.
It doesn't have to be complicated. But it's one of those things that the more you want to learn, the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, there is a next layer and a next layer.
This class is not designed to teach you how to be a colorist. But this is designed to give you a set of tools so that you can make video look good for what you're trying to deliver to.
I get asked the question a lot. Well, I don't really want to modify anything. I just want it to look real. I want it to look accurate. How do I make it look just like real life? And a friend of mine, R. Neil Haugen had a great quote on this. This is the only quote I'm going to read to you today, but I think it's relevant. "Remember that no cameras actually record color. They capture brightness. They use imperfect sensors and chips, covered with imperfect color filters in a grid over the sensor. Then they compute what the color data should look like. No two cameras record identical data. No two monitors show identical imagery. So it's been demonstrated over and over again what is real is always a challenge." Now I have another quote here. I'm not going to read the whole thing to you. And the emphasis is my own at the end.
This is from Alexis Van Hurkman.
Alexis actually wrote the book on color correction. He's also the one responsible for some of the features that I'm going to be showing you today in the new color management that's now found inside of Premiere. I'm also showing this to you in a beta because the 25.1 release seems to be where everything's coming together. So some of this is a little future looking, but you'll see it. I love what he says right at the end here. This is a great quote, but what he says at the end, "At the end of the day, when it looks right to the person that's paying you, it's perfect." Kind of sums things up.
So I do have some basic rules if you're trying to do color and you're trying to be accurate with your color.
Calibrate your environment.
If your monitor has a pink shift to it, everything will start to look green.
Our eyes work relative to the environment around us.
What is white? Everybody remember the whole thing with the gold and white dress or the blue and black dress? It's all dependent on your environment. So if you're trying to do color grading and you're in an environment where there's a bright pink wall behind you, you're going to start seeing white differently. And then when you hand the footage off to the client, they're going to go, "Why does the skin look green?" Your monitor has controls for calibration. There are tools that are available for calibrating your monitor. It's worthwhile to make sure you do this. It really, really can make a difference. Now I'm not suggesting that everybody in here needs to run over to Flanders and buy like a super, super expensive monitor for color grading. But just make sure that whatever screen you happen to be working on is displaying color at least reasonably accurately.
The neutral environment is a big part of this. And in fact, for about $40 you can get something called a bias light. You know what a bias light is, is this is a light that actually mounts behind your monitor and it throws some light on the wall, which hopefully is either a white or a black wall, so that it helps your eyes in seeing the brightness values accurately. The human eye is way more sensitive to brightness than it is to color. And so sometimes if just the brightness values change, it can make our eyes think we're seeing something that's more saturated or less saturated.
How many here know how to use a waveform monitor and a vectorscope? Okay, you all will know by the end of this session, hopefully. At least the basics.
They're invaluable tools for seeing what your eyes can't. They can really, really help in determining what is going on in your picture. I am going to cover the waveform monitor when I jump into Premiere, but I wanted to talk about the vectorscope for a second because the vectorscope has a really neat tool in it.
It also helps remind everybody that we're all human. There is a line.
It's hard to see here, but there is a line in that upper, around the 10, 11 o'clock quadrant here. Everybody know what that line is called? Skin line.
All human pigment falls on that line.
And it is a fantastic way of just double-checking to make sure if I'm doing something else creative, is the skin being affected by it? And if it is being affected by it, do I want to fix that? Now I'm not suggesting you always have to fix human skin tone.
Back before we had digital color grading, there were plenty of feature films out there that you were reliant on the color that you got. You could make some tweaks in the lab, but there wasn't a whole lot of time worrying about making sure that skin tone looked accurate or right all the time. And that is a creative decision you can still take today. So I'm not here to drive your creative process, but this is a big subject of debate. When all these tools came out, it became a very common process on a lot of feature films. And I want to give a shout out to Stu Maschwitz because he first pointed this out to me in a blog post back in 2008, that the modern look of film, it doesn't matter if the scene is in the rain on a bridge or in a warm cabin, skin tone tends to look accurate because we now have the tools to do that if we want.
So it's a choice to make. It's something to discuss with your director.
Or if you're the director, it's a choice you have to make yourself. But we have the tools to fix this, and I'm going to give you guys a bunch of tips on this. The things the human eye goes to the most, skin tone is definitely one of them.
Greenery and sky, the blue and the greens, making sure that those are accurate.
If you have an object of interest, that takes precedence over everything. Getting the car the same color from shot to shot, that's important to the car maker. If the region of interest is a corporate logo, getting that accurate is important.
Everything else you can play with.
One last thing is just about footage and, in fact, someone came up to me and asked me this question because modern cameras don't just-- It used to be you shot what you shot, you dealt with it in post. Most cameras have one or two recording modes. Most cameras today now have a plethora of different recording modes.
If I had to pick one of these, shooting LOG, in this case, this is taken from a Canon camera. So the C-LOG format would probably be what I would shoot.
And the reason being LOG format is the most future proofed or the most protected. RAW is typically also, part of LOG. They're different. RAW is recording the native camera sensor and then we're decoding that. Those are heavier files. But LOG is actually doing something to protect the highlights. Now we're going to talk more about a waveform monitor in a second. If the chart on the left doesn't make any sense to you, we'll get to this. But you'll notice how the image on that chart is all crushed down in the middle of the waveform display. That's the idea behind LOG footage is it's protecting the shadows. It's protecting the highlights in a way that can be mathematically stretched back out to look accurate. So if I expose this in such a way that right here where the white area is all the way at the top of this, that little bit of red at the top would be clipped off the image and that wouldn't be recoverable.
So this is the reason why LOG footage is a good idea. And most camera makers do have a mode to shoot in. Now of course, the big challenge with LOG footage, if you start editing with LOG footage and the producer walks in the room, they're going to look at this and go, "Why does the footage look like that?" And that's where we get into color management.
In the past, in order to have to work with this, most folks were using tools, little tiny files that the camera makers make that are called LUTs. How many here are familiar with LUTs? Okay.
Technical LUTs are used to take this footage and stretch it back out again so that it looks halfway decent. And those people, their job is to take this footage, stretch it all out, render it to a new format, and hand it off to the editing team. These are digital imaging technicians that do this type of work today.
This is what this clip looks like once it's been color managed.
And you can see how that same little narrow band in the center of the waveform before has now been stretched out and we're seeing this rich detail. We're seeing all of the color looking pretty good, okay? This becomes the new starting point to then grade and start making decisions on top of this. Do we want to highlight, make the sky more saturated? Do we want to lighten up Michelle in this shot? Do we want to lighten her up a little bit? Or all the different adjustments that you can do with your footage today. But color management is where it all starts.
Now there's the last thing to think about while you're doing your grading. And this is the million-dollar question that I get asked all the time.
I've been doing all of this color work. It looks great on my monitor. I've double-checked and I made sure that the monitor is calibrated. I've got color management turned on by default. Everything seems to be set up correctly. But when I go to render to a QuickTime file, the QuickTime file looks different.
Why is that? Delivery format matters.
The viewing options matter.
There are some real challenges in the industry with a particular part of color called gamma. It has to do with the transition from the darkest parts of the video to the lightest parts of the video. There's usually a number associated with it. For broadcasting, we use one gamma value. It's 2.4 is the number if anybody's interested.
For the web, it's 2.2. Little tiny difference.
For QuickTime player, it changes your gamma to 1.96.
I don't know why. It's been doing it for 20 years. I think somebody at one point thought, "Well, that looks better." I don't know.
There are alternative players even on the Mac. How many here use something called VLC player? Okay. VLC will show you accurate gamma. QuickTime player will not. If you are trying to QC, or test your files and then you're sending them to broadcast, or you're uploading to the web, I do recommend using VLC as a solution for doing that. And that's simply because it will honor the gamma of the file. And there is actually a setting in Premiere which we're going to get to. But it's important to note that when you are exporting, you need to make sure your export format properly supports the color work that you've done in Premiere, that you're selecting the correct export preset. And in particular with gamma, it's something that you want to set Premiere's viewing options so that it is showing you the gamma of what you're delivering to.
Now this can be a challenge for some pipelines. If the way you work is you deliver a QuickTime file, your boss looks at it in QuickTime player, and if he approves it or she approves it, it goes to air on a television station.
You're going to want to keep the gamma 2.4 for broadcast, but they're going to be looking at incorrect gamma. So I don't have a uniform solution for all this. It is the type of thing that using tools for review and approval like Frame.io can really help in this matter because Frame actually does gamma really well. Okay. All right. We're going to talk a little bit here about SDR and HDR, but I can't dive too deep in the hour that we have.
How many here are delivering high dynamic range content today? Just out of curiosity. Okay. All the rest of you, look at these folks because it is going to be the future. You're going to see more and more HDR production. This is high dynamic range. It has to do with having incredibly bright highlights that can actually make your pupils dilate. If you don't have an HDR TV today, you're in for a treat when you get one.
I also have a resource here for you. Go ahead and get out your phones. I'll leave this up for a second. Jarle Leirpoll is an Adobe master trainer. He's a friend of Adobe. We let him keep the URL premierepro.net But he has some wonderful guides. He's been writing for the Frame.io team on the blog there. So if you're looking for a guide to coloring, this is a fantastic little resource for you guys to check out.
Everybody got it? I can put it up again at the end.
Okay.
I'm going to dive out of here.
And we're going to jump into Premiere.
And we're going to start talking about a waveform monitor for a second.
Because I think it's important everybody understand what you're actually looking at when you see that crazy display on a waveform display.
A waveform monitor, if you're not familiar with it and I'll go ahead and we'll just hide our vectorscope for a second here so that we get that bigger.
The waveform monitor is looking at the picture from left to right.
And it is displaying brightness values. So right now at the top of this is a value of 100. At the bottom of it is 0. 0 is black. 100 is pure white. Everything in the middle is some value of gray.
So you'll notice there's a line here.
If I grab my Pen tool, or actually, let me select my shape here would be the better way of doing that, and move this shape around, you can see how that line is moving left and right on the screen. So if I see something wrong on the waveform monitor that's on the left-hand side of the screen, where do I look in my picture to fix that? On the left-hand side of the screen. Now up and down is a value of brightness. So if I take this and I'm going to go to my Properties here.
We'll select this Shape layer.
If I start playing with a color picker here and we make it brighter. It's going to go up on the waveform display. If I bring it to black, it's going to go down. Everybody understand that? Do you see how that's working there? So when you're looking at a picture, the value that you see in the waveform monitor depends on the luminance or the brightness value that you're seeing. Now you'll notice that as I move this over here, you're starting to see a red and blue line separate. The waveform monitor does show color if you want it to. I am actually using the Lumetri scope. Oh, I have to click off of this.
I'm using the Lumetri scope that's called Waveform RGB. So it will show you red, green, and blue values. And that's where you see the different colors in there. Now a more real world approach to this, if I click over on this clip here. Here, you're seeing blue sky everywhere. That's this blue line going across here. Do you see how the values dip here and here? That represents the two people in the shot. So if I'm trying to do something for this person and I'm using the waveform display, I'm looking at this area right here.
Makes sense? Similarly, when we talk about color, the vectorscope is a tool for looking at color. There's that line approaching the skin line right there. I can see some additional color over here. And if I go into Lumetri and I just grab the saturation, you see how it brings that image up and down. So how big the trace is on a vectorscope shows me how much saturation I have.
And each of these different quadrants, if we look really closely here, red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, yellow. You ever looked at a series of color bars? There's your color bars. On a calibrated imagery, you should see the red being the red dot, the magenta being the magenta dot, and so on and so forth. Okay. So that's just a quick thing on understanding scopes. Does that resonate with you guys? Make sense to everybody? Okay. It's a fantastic tool because if I say, "Hey, part of the video looks a little too bright." It's like, "Well, how bright is it?" Well, it's peaking at 90 on the scope. I can assign a number to it because I know on the waveform display I can see a reference. And now I have something to talk about. I can say, "Well, the other clips it's peaking at 80, this one is peaking at 90.
It's a lot more sense. Okay, let's go into some of the basics here. I want to talk right now about color management. And to do that, I'm just going to take this clip and match frame it over into my source monitor to show you what's going on here.
This clip is something that was shot on a Sony FX3, and it is a LOG clip.
The LOG look is showing up in my source monitor, but something magical is happening. It's automatically being transformed on the right-hand side. This is color management in action here. Premiere in this sequence is saying, "I'm going to make sure that all the footage that gets dropped into this looks good." If I have any questions about any footage coming in, I can actually select clips in the bin. And by going to Modify, Color, I can see exactly what the color space of my footage is and whether Premiere is recognizing it by default or not.
Just to show you all the different formats that are now supported, there used to be three cameras that were supported in here. Now there's 20, I think. Apple Log, if you're shooting on an iPhone, newer iPhone is a great tool. ARRI Log, Canon Log, Fuji Log, DJI D-Log, Leica L-Log, Nikon N-Log. The list goes on and on. So we are now supporting color management as an option for all of these different formats.
If something is not detected, and this can happen to you, if somebody has taken your footage and transcoded it to ProRes, for example, that metadata may not show up correctly. So this is where I can go in and I can select a range of clips, right-click, Modify, Color, and I can override it. If I know that this footage comes from a particular camera, I can override it. Now you can mix and match this with-- If you have a LUT and you look at the way Premiere is doing the color and you say, "I like the Canon LUT better or I like the, in this case, the ARRI ALEXA LUT, I can still use that." So these ARRI clips that I'm using today looks like I've got them set to ARRI LogC3, but I've also got a place in here. If I just want to use the existing color space and LUT manage, I could actually add a LUT here if I wanted to. So you can use LUTs if you need to, but for most of us that extra headache of having to go and get the LUT files downloaded from the camera vendor, add them to every clip as the clips come in, we don't have to do that anymore with this color management. It will be handled automatically by Premiere.
Now there are some settings that you have to go in and just double-check and make sure that they're set up correctly. They're in a number of different locations, but I'll show you where there's a one-stop shop for setting all of these if you want. Project Settings, there's some color settings you want to make sure and turn on. Auto Detect Log Color is something that is an option you can turn it on or off. Enable Color Space Aware Effects is a good thing to turn on as well. We'll get to that in a second. But these are some options that you might want to make sure and turned on. And this is where we find the Viewer Gamma setting. So if I'm delivering for broadcast, this would be what I would leave it to. If I was delivering to the web, I might knock it down to 2.2. Or if I absolutely positively need 1.96 so that what comes out of Premiere will look good in QuickTime, I can set that as well.
Now this is just one set of settings. These are project wide settings. Premiere is set up in such a way that every sequence also has some color adjustments for that particular sequence. Why? You might be delivering in two different formats. You might be delivering for broadcast, and you might in standard dynamic range, as well as high dynamic range. So there are a bunch of these settings. They seem to be random in different places. We've designed Premiere so that there is a one-stop shop. I'm using the COLOR workspace right now. And the Lumetri Color panel is where the tool palette is for doing all your color adjustments.
There's now a Settings option here. And if I click on that, this is where I have my preferences.
I have my Project settings. These are the same settings I just showed you over in Project Settings, but this is a different way of getting to them. So at a glance, if I'm seeing something's not working the way I want to, this is where I can go in and I can check this.
Now I'm going to jump into-- Oh, by the way, here's the clip that I have selected in the timeline. Here's where that Modify, Color, these are the same settings here. Okay, we'll twirl that up.
Now I want to talk about what the timeline is doing to my color. This is what the original clip looks like in that LOG, non-managed look. We are color managing on a sequence level, so every sequence has a color setup to it.
The one that I currently have set here is called Direct Rec. 709.
Now all this means is this is a sequence that is set up for typical delivery of video. And this is like an old-- It's a legacy way of working. This is the way Premiere Version 24 works and all previous versions of Premiere have worked with Rec. 709 is the spec for color. It's that smaller triangle you saw on that slide earlier today.
And Premiere takes all of the footage and converts it to something that looks good for Rec. 709.
That also unfortunately means that certain values are minimized because we got to transform everything at the first step and it means that you can lose a little bit of highlight detail. Now I'm going to show you an example of this.
We'll jump over to the Edit tab. And I'm just going to grab the Exposure on this clip and bring this down.
It's not that it's doing a bad thing here, but you notice how the luminance value-- Let me switch over to Scopes over here so that we can see this.
You notice as I'm doing this...
Everything is raising and lowering at the same rate.
And I know for a fact that her shirt and everything inside the car versus the area that's in bright sunlight, there was a difference in dynamic range there. Her arm should be staying brighter. When I'm in this Direct Rec. 709 mode, I don't get that capability. As I'm moving this exposure slider, it's darkening everything down and I can see that there isn't anything above 60 at this point on my waveform display.
I want to show you and give you a little preview of the new hotness that's coming to Premiere. Instead of going to Rec. 709 directly, we have a new playground to work with color. It's called Wide Gamut.
Now Wide Gamut means it has more colors to work with, more luminance values to work with. So instead of going LOG footage transformed into Rec. 709, we're going LOG footage into a beautiful playground.
That's the best technical term I can give to you. For those who are interested, under the hood, Premiere is taking a small part of ACES from the academy, color management system. We're working with the color space called ACEScct. It's a known commodity. It's a Wide Gamut field. It's used by other tools in the industry. So it's something that people know and understand. But when I flip this to Wide Gamut... Did you see the difference? I'll do that one more time.
Old and busted? New hotness.
All right. Thank you.
So the other side of this, this means that now Premiere has what's called a working color space. We're going to be processing stuff in this amazing playground. But what does that mean for delivery? Well, that means that Premiere also now has stuff that it does at the output step. So instead of converting everything to 709 going in and having a limited range to play around with, we can do all this amazing work with color. And then when it's time to deliver, we go to our output color space and we set what that's going to be.
So over here, you'll see that there is now an output color space option that is a separate option. So I can still deliver in 709. There's also these advanced options here for 2020 or HLG or PQ. Use those if you have the right gear and the right equipment to work with HDR footage. I'd say 95 to 99% of the people in this room are going to want to still-- Excuse me, work in Rec. 709 as your output color space. There's really no reason not to use the Wide Gamut option.
The reason that the legacy option is in there is just for backwards compatibility. Because nobody likes to open up a project from five years ago and suddenly go, "Oh, my colors have all changed." So that's why that's there. But Wide Gamut is what we were expecting people to start using moving forward.
Now one expert level tip here that I'll give you. If you're not working with LOG footage, if you work with a source, you're working with a broadcaster, everything is already managed as 709 coming in. You may want to use this second option here that says Minimal Tone Mapping. That just keeps the brightness levels identical to what you would expect.
But for the rest of us, and particularly if we're going to be doing grading, use the Tone Mapping option. Okay. Really quick, I'm going to go fast through a couple of different options here just as far as working with color.
So the first thing is just using the basic correction options. If you haven't played with this Auto function, it was rewritten a couple of years ago to leverage analysis done by an AI algorithm. So this was trained by looking at similar types of footage to your current frame, and it makes adjustments to the color values in the basic correction to what it thinks is going to give you the best look. This one, it's really subtle. If you're just trying to get something out the door, going through and doing Auto is an easy way of attacking this.
You always have the ability to use your human eyes to adjust it further from there. You can see in most cases these are very subtle adjustments.
Make subtle adjustments first.
Unless you're going through and trying to fix really bad footage, it's very easy to go overboard.
I use a technique where I regularly toggle back and forth between what I was at and what I have done to make sure I haven't gone too far. If you're 45 minutes into correcting a single scene, you've probably gone too far, okay? All right, so the basic options are really, really good. And most people understand what these are. I'll show you some examples of using color temperature to change the mood of a scene.
The Creative tab gets deeper into color. If you haven't discovered this, the Vibrance setting from Lightroom is actually in here. So Vibrance does saturation in a different way. It highlights certain areas more than others. It's not a uniform saturation adjustment. It's a very, very good option to work with.
If you come up with a set of settings that match a particular location, you want to go back to that at any point in the process, just know that under the hamburger menu or the fly-out menu next to the words Lumetri Color, you can save these out as presets, and they will show up in your Effects panel later.
Premiere also provides the ability to save out to these other formats to use in other applications.
True story on some of the films I've worked on, the director, the editor actually did color work in the Edit bay because they just wanted to match things, make it look as close to final as possible. Now the studio was paying Technicolor to do the final color, so all that was actually thrown out. But they could provide something and say, "This is our artistic intent. You guys work your magic and go and do it." And so more often than not, I see that in the world of feature film, where there is this attitude of trying to get closer to final in the Edit bay. Most of us are delivering to YouTube. We got to do it all ourselves. So your eyes are the best judge of what's going to look good.
All right. So that's just very, very quickly going over basic and creative. I probably do 80 to 90% of my work just playing with these sliders because they're intuitive.
Exposure is an easy adjustment. And again, what I'm looking at here over here on my Scopes, this is like The Price Is Right. You want to get as close as possible without going over.
One thing of note here to be aware of, in a way, these are in reverse order. I usually start with the blacks and the white slider to bring things down a little bit, bring things up a little bit. This helps to stretch the image out a little bit. And then from there, I might play with these sliders a little bit further.
If I'm working with Curves, this base adjuster for curves can be a very useful way of doing this as well. So if I go to a different shot here, and I want to play with this-- How many here have played with what's called an S-curve? Okay. Very common way of working with the curves adjuster here is to just add a value here to create a bit of a bend to bring the highlights closer to the top.
And grab a curve here to bring the shadows back down closer to the bottom.
So this is another way of getting a bit of more punch to an image very, very quickly. In these steps, we are adjusting everything in the picture. If you want to sound like a colorist, this is what you call primary grading. This is where you're affecting absolutely everything in the image.
If you only want to affect a certain area, like skin tone, or I want to change the saturation of the clouds, the curves adjusters have a wide range of these different values that its value versus value.
If I wanted to pick the blue color and make blue more saturated, I would use my eyedropper here.
Pro tip, hold down the Shift key when you use the eyedropper and it'll grab a wider range of pixels.
And then from here, if I move this up, I'm affecting and boosting the saturation. If I lower it down, I'm going to desaturate the sky.
If I want to reset this entirely, double-click on it. It'll get rid of your points for you.
These can be used creatively. In this example, this is what the original color clothing looks like in this shot.
This is what I've changed it to with a hue versus hue slider.
If you're trying to dial in a client's logo to the correct color after you've done some color grading and the client says that's a little bit off, this is a fantastic tool for trying to get it right.
There's another bunch of adjustments I want to show you here. We're going to walk through skin adjustment, and I'm going to take a little bit extra time on this because I think the majority of us have probably struggled with footage that was shot in mixed lighting conditions. The white balance was off, and you're trying to get the skin where you want it, right? And I also want to talk about matching. Using match color is a trick that we have in here.
So one of the things that we can do if we just want to focus on skin tone, there is an effect in here that's called HSL Secondaries.
Now what this is, this is a tool for picking out a color range and then having a bunch of dedicated controls for this. Sometimes you can do very subtle things that have a big impact on your footage.
So the way this works, starting at the top, there's an option here to set the color that I want to affect. I have to pick a range of color to affect. Again, I'm going to use the eyedropper and we'll just pick out the cheek here.
And I might want to add-- Use the plus eyedropper just to grab the other side just to see if that widens the range out a little bit. Right now, I can't tell what exactly I've selected here. So that's where this little checkbox comes in handy. By checking this box, that looks scary. Okay. But you can now see what I have selected. So this gives me an option to say, you know what, go in here a little bit and add that range in as well.
Now I like to look at that as least as possible, but just to point out that Luma values can make a difference in what we're seeing here. This tool provides the ability to look at this on a black background, a white background, white on black, so that we can see where the mask is. Now I am getting a little bit of the hair. I'm getting a little bit of the jacket here. So this is the type of case where I might want to come in, use the minus eyedropper, and get very precise in there, and maybe pull a little bit of that out of there. For now I'm just going to leave this as is because the adjustment I'm actually going to make to this is just to do a little saturation boost on the skin values. So let's turn off our masking, and I'm just going to come down here. Oh, and by the way, if your mask is looking noisy, there is a Denoise slider that can help eliminate some of that. If you want to blur the mask a little bit, you can also do that. That prevents to have any type of hard edges. But this is an easy way of using the secondary color to get a selection down. And now I can just come in here. I'll take it way up so that you can see it.
And then I'll drop it back down again. So I'm not really affecting much of the rest of the image, but I'm just adding a little bit of life in the cheeks. I'm double-checking and making sure I'm still mostly staying on that skin line. That's fine. I'll turn that on and off. Everybody see the difference there? Okay. So that's using an HSL Secondary by itself.
This works in a lot of different circumstances. Here's another example. We can do the exact same thing. And here, the bias to the eye is being affected by all the greenery around her.
And some of that light is bouncing in an uncontrolled environment. It's adding just a little bit of green to this. It's pushing it to the left of the skin line just a touch. So I want to play with that and work with that. So again, eyedropper. We'll grab a color. I'll grab the shadowy side of her face as well. We'll check our mask. That's looking pretty good. We could widen this out. For giggles, I'm just going to leave it for the sake of time. And now I could come down here and maybe in this case I want to either brighten things up a little uniformly or maybe I want to darken down a little bit. That adds to the saturation perception. And then maybe we'll-- It's starting to hit the skin line already, but maybe I want to stretch out and add a little bit more saturation. There's way too much. See how easy it is to go overboard? I'm going to dial that back down again.
And again, I think I'm going to push it maybe just a little touch into the reds.
And if I take my little tool, I can turn it on and off.
And I can see how that's going to play over time.
I like it.
Okay. Thank you.
Now-- Thank you, guys.
Here is a hard example. Why? This light right here is right on the skin line.
Oh, my goodness. How do we fix this? Well, I'm going to start the same way I would typically start. With the eyedropper, I'm going to grab some samples...
In this range.
Just make sure I'm getting everything. I'm seeing these hue saturation and Luma value areas, the ranges are changing. By the way, there are manual controls in here so that if you do want to play with these manually, you can do this by widening these out. And there's ramp controls in here to adjust your selection. Looks like hue is set pretty good. Maybe-- Oh, no. I don't want the light. We'll bring that back down a little bit. Let's take the Luma values.
And the more I adjust this, the more I just want some of that in there. This is 8-bit compressed footage, so you're seeing all of this blockiness right here. That's because this is an MP4 file that I'm working with here. You won't get that with LOG footage recorded in a high-quality format. That's where all that stuff about 10-bit recording, 12-bit recording, LOG makes a big difference. You can color grade anything, but your results may vary. And typically, compressed footage is going to show that macro-blocking a little bit a little bit worse than anything else. I can use the Denoise slider, maybe blur that a little bit so that it's not as noticeable. But in a lot of cases, I'm probably still going to get some of that light. As I work with this further, some of that light is going to show up in this. So how do I correct for that? This is where I'm going to go to my Effect Controls in Premiere.
And I'm going to click on the Lumetri Color and I'm going to add a mask.
So you can use masking.
And don't forget these have Bezier curves, so this is a time to take your Illustrator skills and use them. All right. I messed that up. I'm not going to do this too nicely just because we will run out of time and not have time for questions.
But basically, I want to create a mask to just affect his face.
Maybe one more point there and I'll just curve that in a little bit.
And if you didn't know it, Premiere does have tracking. I can click track forward here. And we'll just give this a second as it goes through and creates a track for me.
And I think for the sake of time, I'm going to stop that. You can see it has created some keyframes for me here.
And that mask is now going to track in the shot for that little bit there. I'm going to jump over to the one I did earlier here just so we can, I'll take this one out of the oven a little bit just for the sake of time. Click on the Mask so you can see there's a much nicer mask that's been drawn. I've pulled out this handle here to soften the edge of the mask. And you can see on this clip, if I zoom in on this, you can see that the mask tracks from the beginning of the clip all the way to the end of the clip.
And here, what I've done is I'm now masking. I'm still using my HSL Secondary. I still have a shape that's chosen there. I may also have a saturation slider boosted.
I'm affecting the location in here. And again, now I'm seeing if I turn this on and off, you can see before, after. You see the difference? So these different ways of working, they actually do stack on top of each other. And you can get down remember I said earlier, color is complicated if you want it to be. If I want to take this up even a further notch, we'll jump over to this as an example here.
And I'll turn everything off so that you can just see the original layer here. This is a shot. It starts with beautiful horses. I already want to correct that horizon line, but no matter. It's handheld. It's deliberate. So I've got a wonderful shot of the horses. I've got the horses coming towards the camera. We've got the guy wrangling the horses here. And then we end on this beautiful close-up shot.
Now in theory I might actually start by using something like the auto-adjuster on this shot just to dial it in.
What I've already done here is I've used a little setting to get the skin tone exactly where I want it. So if I turn this off, there's the original shot.
There's the shot with the adjustment.
Nice and subtle. I'm checking it on the Scopes. It still looks like the main trace is floating along that line there. It's pushing a little bit into the reds. That's the lips and the ears. That's fine. I'm probably getting a little bit of that from this area here. But the idea is to get the skin dialed in.
Now you can use this Lumetri effect on an adjustment layer.
So this is an adjustment layer that I've applied, and if you need to have the same color across multiple clips, you can create an adjustment layer and use the Lumetri Color panel and add color to an adjustment layer. So in this circumstance, I really just use something very, very subtle before, after. You see the color temperature has changed. We've gone to more of a wintery look by just adding a little bit of blue. I just use the basic color in here to adjust this color temperature.
Now I've got that stretched across all my shots.
Now I've got the color for his skin. If I take this adjustment layer off, I'm like, "Well, wait a minute." I did all that work to get the skin tone looking good and now I've thrown an adjustment layer over the top of it. How do I push that forward? How do I bring that forward? If you hold down the Option key or Alt on a Windows machine and drag upwards, you can make a copy of a clip.
Now I'm going to go ahead and just move the copy that I have in V3 over a little bit in case I want to go back and show you what I spent some time working on here. But what I'm going to do in this case is I'm going to take this clip and I'm going to Option drag it up... So that I've copied it so it's now over the adjustment layer. But that defeats the purpose of the adjustment layer. How do I correct for that? Well, I masked the skin tone in that first layer.
So if I select this first layer... And right-click on the Mask and say Copy...
When I go up to this clip on the top here...
I want to copy that mask into opacity.
So I'm taking the mask that I used for color in one layer, and I'm adding it to the Opacity in the other. So I'll go ahead and paste that in.
And now by doing that...
Let's see. Before, after.
Everybody see the difference there? Okay. Thank you.
Now I've got one more quick timeline I want to show you because I want to talk about a problem. And first off, how many people in the room are still delivering for broadcast? Have to go through a QC check. You ever failed QC because they told you your black values are too black? Okay.
This is a problem.
And I wanted to show a couple of examples of this. So couple of things here.
I am looking at my Waveform scope. And in fact, I'll go ahead and I'll turn off the Vectorscope for this because you can't really see that luminance value with the vectorscope.
If you're looking at a waveform display, I like to keep this Clamp Signal on because this prevents the picture from bouncing around all over the place. So I just like the look of it when I'm playing video. But I turn this off when I'm QCing my own work to check for black values.
Everybody see the number 0 here? Anything under 0 is considered super black, is the term used for that. And that means these are preserved black values that I could use to color grade in a separate step. I could bring them back in. They're not being clipped or distorted. But from a broadcast perspective, they hate super blacks. It's one of those things that it can mess with transmission mediums. And if you've ever gotten a QC report back that says, "The black values are too low, this is what's going on." So I can use this to do a quick check of a number of different tools and just see if anything is under 0. In this case, it's the sweater, this guy is wearing is showing up, and I'm also getting a little bit in the edges of the windows here. I can see that's underneath the 0 value. Easiest way to correct for this, under Basic Correction, just grab the slider for Blacks and lift it up. And if you have this not clamped, let me show you what this looks like when you play it back and why I typically leave Clamp Signal on when I'm actually editing. See how everything's bouncing at the end? That's showing me, it's giving me extra room to show values below 0. And so if I have something going on where things are down below 0, it provides that room for me, and all I need to do is just lift this up to a point where that 0 number goes all the way down to the bottom again.
Now yes, you would have to do that on a clip by clip basis, or you would have to create an adjustment layer over everything to just lift the blacks a bit. But yeah, it is a known issue. Okay. I've got one other thing that I wanted to quickly cover here, and then I have a little bit of time for questions. When it's time to export, make sure you're exporting to the correct format.
If hard drive size is not an issue, it's not an uncommon thing to export out what we like to call a mezzanine file. This is something that has really good color quality and fidelity that can then be compressed to YouTube or compressed to other delivery specs. The one thing I want to point out here, and this is more for that handful of people that are delivering in high dynamic range formats. If I am editing in Premiere and I have my output color space is set to 2100 for PQ or HLG delivery, anybody who watched the World Cup, that was actually produced in a high dynamic range format. So this is something that it's not a niche case. There are some big projects and a lot of people that are working on this. But something to note about Premiere, when you choose an option that says Match Source, it doesn't automatically pick the correct color space to export to. Most of you are going to want to choose this H.264 Match Source - High bitrate.
That's a good MP4 delivery. If you need a file format that's more of a mezzanine, something like ProRes 422 is a good option. DNX is another format that works well as a mezzanine. You can pick a high bitrate for that. The one thing I wanted to point to is if you are delivering those high dynamic range formats, know that there's a More presets option. What you see in this list has been paired down to the most common formats. But if you're somebody who delivers a not so common format, make sure you know to click on More presets and do a search in here for what you're looking for because there are hundreds and hundreds of presets included with Premiere. We just don't want to throw you off with a laundry list in here. If I know I'm delivering to a spec that uses HLG, I'll come in here and type in HLG. These are all the formats that support HLG, and I can turn on the Favorites option for the ones that I need to deliver to.
So just know that color space, even if you're working with something that says Match Source, color space is not something that's supported by the presets at this time. So you want to make sure you're picking a delivery format. The one good thing is if you have the wrong one selected, there is a little exclamation point here that's letting me know that, "Hey, your output preset doesn't match the color space of your timeline." So it will warn you. But it doesn't really help you find what you're looking for. Where it's going to find it is under the three dots, More presets, use the Preset Manager to get you the right presets.
That's everything I've got for you today. Was this useful to you guys? Okay.
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