A video of skateboarders that has been color corrected and color graded.

PREMIERE PRO FEATURES

Breathe life into your videos with color correction and color grading.

Edit colors to subtly shift mood and tone in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Control your colors.

Give your footage the look you want with the all-in-one color correcting and color grading tools in Premiere Pro. Make one-click corrections or fine-tune the white balance and tone in the Lumetri Color panel.

Why correct color in videos?

Even if you use the same cameras and lights for every shot of your project, when you get to post-production you might find that your hue, saturation, and brightness have changed drastically from one camera setup to the next. Once you’ve cut your footage, you need to even out those values to bring your video color in line with what your eye perceives.

How to do basic color correction.

There’s no single right way to correct the color of your video, but a good place to start is by calibrating your monitor. Once you have an accurate sense of your monitor’s color profile, you’ll know that the colors you’re choosing are the right ones for a natural look. If you don’t calibrate your monitor, be sure to look at your video on a few different devices to ensure it looks good on all of them.

When you’re ready to start correcting in Adobe Premiere Pro, begin by opening the Color workspace and clicking the Basic Correction section.

White balance describes the temperature of the whites in your video. If your whites appear tinted blue or yellow, you can adjust them. Because white is a component in all your other colors, this will help your whole picture look more realistic.

Director and editor Jonathon Pawlowski suggests holding a white card or paper in front of the camera before every shot. “If you want to color balance the image, you can use the Eyedropper to click the white card, and that will tell the computer, ‘This is white.’ The white balance will adjust, and that’s a good place to start.”

Another way to adjust the white balance is to use the color Temperature and Tint sliders and gauge the effect on the video clip. Move the Temperature slider left to add blue to your whites and move it right to add orange. Move the Tint slider left to shift the whites toward green and move it right to shift them toward magenta.

Under the Tone heading, you can use sliders to adjust Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, and Saturation. Skin tone can be the most difficult shade to get right and the easiest to notice when it’s wrong, so pay close attention to the skin tones of your subjects.

One helpful way to gauge skin tone is to look at the Lumetri YUV vectorscope, which is a circular graph that measures brightness (the Y value) against color (U and V values). To isolate the skin tone, go to Effect Controls and add a mask. Draw a box around the face of your subject, and then check the vectorscope to see how closely the skin tone falls to the line separating magenta from yellow. This line is called the “skin tone line.” However your subject's skin tone is showing up that day, it should look best if it’s sitting close to that line. If necessary, make adjustments to the Temperature and Tint sliders to move the tone closer to the line.

Once skin and midtones look natural, check to make sure your highlights and shadow details aren’t lost. Use the Lumetri Color waveform scope and histograms to ensure that the values of your tones aren’t too bright or too dark. These are charts that show the tones of your footage laid out by numerical value. On the waveform scope, your brightest whites should be no higher than 100 IRE and your darkest blacks should be no lower than 0 IRE.

Finesse colors with ease.

Adjust shadows, midtones, and highlights. Or take the color grade from one shot and apply it to another. Color Match, powered by AI, does it in one click.

Learn how to use Lumetri Color scopes.

In the Lumetri Color panel, you can find a variety of color correction tools.

Curves controls: Use the Curves controls to make precise adjustments to luminance, hue, and saturation. Use Hue versus Hue curves to change specific colors, like making your blues look more green. Or add depth by pulling the straight line on your RGB curves into an S curve (this increases the contrast of your image).

Color wheel adjustments: Finally, color wheels allow you to adjust highlights, shadows, and midtones separately. Click and drag to shift their hue, saturation, and brightness for each of these three tone types. For example, you could shift your shadows to be brighter and have a blue tint.

After you’ve achieved a color balance that looks right, you can begin replicating that in other sequences.

Professional colorist Gerry Holtz emphasizes the value of a light touch: “One of the biggest mistakes a lot of people make is color correcting too much and having to correct their own problems. If you do a bunch of stuff one way, and then you go into Curves and you don’t like the image, you might be trying to take something out that you put in.” If you find yourself in that position, Holtz suggests saving a still image, resetting, and then trying to recreate that image with fewer adjustments.

Get creative.

Apply Lumetri looks or import your own color presets to change the mood or give your shot that cinematic feel.

Color grading tips.

Once you’ve corrected the color so your video has an even, unified look, you can use color more artistically. Choose a palette that reflects the mood of each particular section of a piece and experiment with boosting different colors to reflect the emotional tenor. A happy family scene might be done with bright tones of yellow and orange, while another scene in a post-apocalyptic wasteland might be dark and tinted blue.

Color panel superimposed on two photos of a skateboarder. The second photo has color grading applied.

Shift the mood.

“Color grading is very similar to mood music,” Holtz says. “You put in dramatic music and the whole scene comes down. You put in the happy music, the whole scene goes up. You can do that same thing in color, but it’s got to be subtle.”

Two photos of a roller skater. Both pictures have different color grading applied.

A little grading goes a long way.

Filmmaker and writer David Andrew Stoler cautions against doing too much. “If there’s a major shift in emotional tone or perspective, then you’ll want to change something,” Stoler says. “But you’re working off a basic palette that you laid down in the beginning. If you want to amplify a certain feeling, just do a little shift.”

Three photos of a skateboarder. Each photo has different color correction and color grading applied.

Color correct before you color grade.

Holtz stresses the importance of color correcting before grading, and of doing so with delicacy. “If, after you’ve color corrected, you want to give it a warm tone, do it in a way that it feels warmer without it feeling like it’s yellow all of a sudden. The real trick is finding that balance. For me, it never looks good when it’s got a color wash over it.”

Lookup Table panel superimposed on a photo of a person.

A glut of LUTs.

LUTs, or Lookup Tables, are like filters you can drop into your timeline to establish an instant look or mood in your footage. Premiere Pro comes with several options, and you can import third-party LUTs that will give your video the look of a Hollywood blockbuster. “They’re useful tools that can make the whole thing nice and look one specific way,” Stoler says.

Work with color in Adobe Premiere Pro.

With Premiere Pro, you can correct the color of your video to make it look natural and realistic, and then grade the color for a moody and cinematic feel. Experiment until you find the looks you want. The more you practice, the more intuitively you’ll know what adjustments to make and when.

Contributors

Jonathon Pawlowski, Gerry Holtz, David Andrew Stoler