For this tutorial, I'm using the Lumetri Curve Controls.prproj file.
You can find that project file with the media associated with this project.
Just double click on the project file to open it in Premiere Pro CC.
There are several ways to adjust the brightness of your clips.
The Curve controls offer a quick, intuitive way to make adjustments that are natural and nuanced looking.
I'm in the Color workspace in Premiere Pro CC.
And you can reset that workspace by clicking on the Panel menu in the workspace's panel.
In this workspace, I'm going to bring up my Lumetri Scopes.
And I'm making sure that I've got the Waveform (YC no Chroma) displayed.
You can just right click in the middle of the Lumetri Scopes panel to choose the waveform.
And make sure that you've got the Waveform Type set to YC no Chroma.
I also have the first clip in this master sequence already selected which means changes I make in the Lumetri Color panel will update this clip.
I'm going to switch to the Curves controls.
And I'm particularly interested in the RGB Curves.
By default, the RGB Curves control gives you the luminance or brightness control.
This is the overall composite image that you'd be adjusting.
If I select any of these color channels at the top, I can make changes to each individual channel.
The best way to understand the Curve control is to look at the grid lines.
The bottom edge of this graph indicates the original level of each pixel in the image.
And the right edge indicates the result of the effect.
Shadows are at the bottom left corner.
And highlights are at the top right.
The line in between the two indicates the overall adjustment that you're making.
Right now, of course, there's no adjustment at all.
If I click on this line, and you can see before I do anything, I get a Pen Tool cursor with a little plus symbol.
I can drag this line down.
And as I do, a control point is added.
The result is a beautiful even curve right the way through this line.
What I've just done is taken the midpoint at 50% and drag it down to 25%.
The darkest shadows and the brightest highlights are unchanged by this adjustment.
But there's a natural curve to the midtones that is darker.
With the pixels that were 50% bright now coming out of the effect at 25%.
Because this curve indicates the adjustment that you're making to the image, you can see the result will vary over the range of brightness: from shadow to highlight.
So, here, for example, you can see that pixels that were previously around about the 75% mark are now being output closer to the 50% mark about halfway up the graph.
It's unlikely you'd ever make such an extreme adjustment.
However, the Curves control offers much more subtle changes.
You can reset this control by double clicking on the line which I'm going to do right now.
This clip has low contrast.
And the Waveform display shows that the highlights and shadows don't reach the full dynamic range available.
So, let's fix that with the Curve control.
I'm going to take this control point that's already been added at the bottom of the curve.
And drag it along until I see the pixels in the Waveform display hit the bottom of the dynamic range.
Now I'm going to take the control point at the top of the line and drag this in until the highlight pixels are just touching the 100 IRE mark: the top of the dynamic range.
And you can see we've got some very brightly lit leaves here at the top left corner of the image.
And those are just hitting that top line now in the Waveform display.
You may not always want to fully expand the contrast in this way, but it certainly adds a lot more depth to this shot which was captured in a S-log 2.
Now I'm going to add just a little more nuance.
I'm going to click and drag to pull the shadows in a little more.
And I'm going to click and drag to lift the highlights a little more.
What's beautiful about the Curves control is that it adds a nuanced adjustment right the way across the dynamic range without you needing multiple complex adjustments.
If I toggle this control off and back on again, you can really see the difference.
I'm going to go to my Effect Controls panel.
I'm going to select the Lumetri Color effect that I've just added by making adjustments.
I'm going to right click and choose Copy and then I'll select the other two clips.
And I'm going to press here on Windows Control V, that'd be Command V on Mac OS, to paste the effect onto both of the clips in my sequence.
I'm particularly interested in this third clip though.
Looking back at my Lumetri Scopes panel, I can see that now we've got a reasonable dynamic range because of the adjustment I just copied and pasted onto the effect.
But I kind of want to warm this shot up.
I have two clips selected right now, so I can't make adjustments in the Lumetri Color panel.
I need to deselect by clicking on the background of the Timeline panel and then select the clip, so I can work on it.
I'm going to switch to the red channel.
And I'm just going to lift the red channel a little.
In the midtones, our color perception naturally expects no color tint in the highlights and shadows of a shot.
So, changing just the midtones in this way can produce more acceptable results.
If I double click to reset this red channel adjustment, I can click to add control points in the highlights and shadows.
And then drag up again to warm up the midtones to create an even more natural looking result.
I'm really just adding these top and bottom control points to lock down the adjustment, so that none of the shadows or highlights are changed.
Looking at the second clip in this sequence, I can see that we've got some beautiful green in the background of the shot.
And I'm interested to raise the saturation for the green to really make it stand out.
I'm going to use the Hue Saturation Curves control to do that.
And this is a slightly different approach to curves.
Rather than a graph with light coming in and light coming out, we've got an overall Color Wheel.
And our line allows us to adjust the amount of saturation applied to these various hues.
I'm going to start by clicking on this green selection.
And that's going to add three control points for me in a similar way that I did when working on the red channel on the previous clip.
I'm going to pull up the green saturation here.
And perhaps I'll expand to include this cyan and pull this up.
Add another control point.
And there just lift that saturation a little more.
Again, if I turn off the Curves controls and turn them back on again, you can really see the impact of this effect.
As you can see, these adjustments are a bit of a science and art.
And you'll spend quite a bit of time making nuanced adjustments to these controls.
That's working with the RGB Curves, and Hue Saturation Curves controls in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
