Tutorial: Using the New Lumetri Color Interface in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015

Getting Creative

The easiest way to get creative in the Lumetri Color panel is to apply a Look, by going into the Creative area, opening the Look drop-down menu, and choosing a Look from the list. As you can see in Figure 11 (below), there are a bunch of canned Looks that you can apply.

Figure 11. You can choose a preset Look from this list (which is much longer than what you see here).

If you created your own looks or somebody sent you a Look or you downloaded one from a website, click Browse in the drop-down menu (as shown in Figure 11) and then you can locate and load the Look.

You can browse through the Looks that are installed in the program by clicking through them. The name of the Look appears at the thumbnail in the Creative panel, where you can see it applied to your clip. One Look that I like is Clean Punch HDR (shown both the thumbnail and the Program window in Figure 12, below), which makes the colors really pop.

Figure 12. Our clip with the Clean Punch HDR Look applied. Click the image to see it at full size.

If we look at the clip with the Clean Punch HDR Look applied as compared to the color-corrected version in Figure 10, we see that the colors are really vivid. You can see on the left in Figure 12 how the Clean Punch HDR Look appears in the scopes. We definitely lost some off the bottom in the waveform, so we’ve got some contrast issues. We're pushing up against the upper limits in all three colors and in brightness. We’ve lost a little bit of detail in the sky areas of the image.

We can fix that a number of ways. One is to reduce the intensity of the look by dragging the Intensity slider (shown just below the Look thumbnail in Figure 12) to the left, which brings back the detail in the sky while still retaining the dramatic improvements the Look made to our clip’s color. Alternatively, we could even go back into the Basic Correction panel and adjust the settings there.

Back in the Creative panel, beyond adjusting the Intensity slider, you use the Adjustment sliders below it (Figure 13, below) to fade the clip a little bit, or you can adjust Sharpness, Vibrancy, or Saturation, or you can adjust the Shadow Tint or the Highlight Tint.

Figure 13. Other adjustment controls in the Creative panel.

Making Colors Pop Using the Hue Saturation Curve

Next we’ll disable this Look and explore some of the creative options in the other sections of the Lumetri Color panel. You can create your own look using Curves or Color Wheels, or work with the Vignette, is a standalone effect included in the Lumetri Color panel.

Let’s start with Curves. I don’t use the red, green, or blue curves much, so I won’t go into detail on those. The Hue Saturation curve, a new feature in Premiere Pro CC 2015, works really well in the context of this clip.

This clip was shot on a March day in Moscow without a lot of blue in the sky. I could improve the clip by increasing the blue in the sky, and also by bringing out the reds in the brick. This is a beautiful old church, and I’d like to highlight its beautiful colors.

Using the Hue Saturation Curve, I can choose distinct areas and increase their saturation. Let's start with the blue. I click the blue circle just below the Hue Saturation Curve in the Curves panel (Figure 14, below), and three squares appear, defining the blue region in the wheel and giving us three adjustment points to create our curve. When I drag the middle one out, it increases the blues in the sky and in the blue dome (Figure 14).

Figure 14. Increasing the blues in the image with the Hue Saturation Curve. Click the image to see it at full size.

I can also expand the range of blues and the intensity by creating another point and adjusting the shape. All of a sudden it looks like a pretty pleasant day in March in Moscow (Figure 15, below).

Figure 15. Blues increased further with an additional point on the curve. Click the image to see it at full size.

You can see our starting point in Figure 10, and compare it to what we were able to create with the curves in Figure 15.

So that took care of the blues. I'd also like to boost the reds just below the domes and the reds in the dome on the right. Again, I can click the red circle just below the Hue Saturation Curve to choose the red preset, which loads the default adjustment points here, or I could start with my own points. If I drag the adjustment points out too far, we’ll end up with a pretty garish look, but if we bring them down a bit, we’ll see the same sort of vivid color in the church that adjusting the blue points gave us in the sky. Figure 16, below, shows before and after.

Figure 16. Before our Hue Saturation Curves adjustments (left) and after (right). Click the image to see it at full size.