Once you have a picture-locked film and a mixed soundtrack, it may seem like the big creative choices are over. Yet there are still important aesthetic decisions to be made before exporting your project and sending it out into the world. And that last step, distribution, is ultimately what we do all of this for in the first place—so people can see our movie.
High Resolution and Color Figures
The Basic Correction level in Premiere Pro’s Lumetri Color panel. With slider controls for color temperatures, exposure correction, contrast, and highlights and shadow adjustment, this “basic” level is already a powerful color correction tool. See the color insert.Two images of Coney Island’s Dreamland in 1905. The contrast range of each image is indicated by the vertical bar on the right of the waveform graticule (arrows). The original image (top) does not take full advantage of the full range of gray scale values. The corrected image (bottom) shows how a little bit of brightness and contrast tweaking can create a richer and more visually dynamic image.Most color correction adjustments are quite subtle. The original image (a) appears somewhat flat and pale. By adjusting luminance values we can create sharper contrast and more depth to the image (b). Adjusting the color further refines the image. In this case increasing saturation and adding a slight amber hue provides a sense of the heat of the summer sun (c). See the color insert.The vectorscope graticule shows small boxes that correspond to the three primary colors-red, green, and blue-and their complementary colors-cyan, magenta, and yellow (top). All skin tones should fall along the skin tone line (arrow) when corrected accurately (bottom). See the color insert.The curve level (top) and the color wheel level (bottom) of the Lumetri color tool in Premiere Pro add greater precision to your NLE color grading capabilities, allowing you to isolate specific color channels or brightness ranges for adjustment. See the color insert.The traditional three way color corrector, like this one found in Avid Media Composer, is a powerful and familiar color grading layout. Adjustments can be made to luminance and chrominance values within three separate areas of your image: shadows (a), mids (b), and highlights (c).In both the Lumetri color wheel level and the three way color tool, correction controls for shadows, mids, and highlights actually overlap somewhat, which means that changes to a specific area of the image will have some effect on other areas as well.Dragging the balance indicator into a specific area of the color wheel balances the image toward that particular color. The closer to the edge you go, the more intense the color becomes: (a) intense blue; (b) lighter blue; (c) intense yellow. See the color insert.Basic color grading on Log footage begins by correcting a color chip chart and flesh tones recorded at the head of each roll. Shown here is the original Log footage (top half) compared to the graded footage (bottom half). If you haven’t shot a color chart, use a representative frame that includes flesh tones. See the color insert.Using the Lumetri Creative level, a built-in film style LUT (Fuji ETERNA 250D) was applied to this clip by simply dragging the LUT onto the clip in the timeline. See the color insert.Both Premiere Pro and Media Composer offer a fairly broad variety of pre-set LUTs built right into the program. See the color insert.Photoshop’s AI-powered generative fill tool lets you add astonishingly photorealistic elements to a static shot in seconds, simply by entering a text prompt. See the color insert.
