Morph Cuts, Time Tuning, and More: Inside the Latest Adobe Creative Cloud Reveal

If you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber, Christmas seems to come in April, when Adobe makes the annual “reveal” for NAB. You all must have been good little girls and boys for the last 12 months, because this year the stocking is particularly full. In this roundup, I’ll identify the high points on Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder, plus give you a preview of the Adobe Character Animator, a new application that could dramatically change web and other remote presentations forever. You’ll be able to read about, and see some of the new features, as Adobe has supplied multiple demo videos.

Premiere Pro

Color is critical to all projects, from simple interviews to feature films. With the new Lumetri Color panel, Adobe has made it faster and easier to adjust the color and apply looks to your projects.

While you could apply Lumetri looks to sequences in the past, you couldn’t edit them. Now you can, and Adobe has integrated much of the functionality of SpeedGrade into Premiere Pro in a much simpler interface (Figure 1, below).

Figure 1. You can now apply and customize Lumetri looks in Premiere Pro. Click the image to see it at full size.

This short video, Lumetri Color panel, demonstrates this feature:

Beyond these simple adjustments, the Lumetri Color panel also lets you adjust color using curves, which many users are familiar with from Photoshop and other applications. You can also make color-specific hue and saturation adjustments via the Lumetri panel Hue/Saturation adjustment (Figure 2, below).

Figure 2. Adjusting the hue and saturation of the red pixels in the shot. Click the image to see it at full size.

This short video, Curve adjustments and the Hue Saturation tool, shows these effects:

Finally, the Lumetri Color panel also debuts a long overdue simplification of Premiere Pro’s three-way color corrector, providing a much simpler, less intimidating tool (Figure 3, below). These are highlighted in the video entitled 3 Way Color Corrector in Premiere Pro Lumetri Color Panel (below Figure 3).

Figure 3. A much simpler, more intuitive three-way color corrector. Click the image to see it at full size.

As with any effect, once you finish your adjustments in the Lumetri Color panel, you can save them into a preset you can reapply to other clips.