Adjusting Basic Exposure in Premiere Pro

Full Video Transcript

Hi, this is Margaret with Noble Desktop, and this is an introduction to basic color correction in Premiere Pro. You may notice that I have my color panel selected up top. Please do the same, and if you don't have it up here in your menu bar, go to Window, Workspace, Color.

As soon as you choose the color workspace, a couple of things happen. One of the things that happens is you're given this Lumetri Color panel and a Lumetri Scope window. You probably do not have these on your window yet unless you put them there, so the way you find them is you go under this wrench and you choose Vectorscope YUV and Waveform RGB. These are the two that I recommend, particularly for people that are wanting a basic introduction to color correction.

Understanding the Vectorscope and Waveform

The vectorscope is the circular scope here, and this is demonstrating to you the saturation levels of the color as well as where the color is situated on this chart. The waveform is this graph, and this is letting you know the color distribution of wherever you might be in this clip. It's actually reflecting the way the color is distributed and also the exposure—are you underexposed, are you beneath zero, are you overexposed, are you above a hundred?

The reason I could tell that it's beneath zero is because I am not clamped. In doing basic color correction, you are attempting to be broadcast safe, within range for broadcast. Not only that, but by doing color corrections you're absolutely making your movie look better. You can see that I have blue down below and I am underexposed. Here's where it's saturated—I do not want to exceed this shape here, and I am slightly exceeding that. So those are two things right away.

Basic Correction Tools and Curves

What am I going to use to do basic color correction? Clearly basic correction, and I also like to work with curves. The other items on here, particularly Color Wheels and Match and HSL Secondary, we'll be spending a lot of time with. When it comes to curves, we have two sections: the top section and the bottom section. The bottom section is called Hue Saturation Curves, which have to do with color grading in a wonderful way where you can change one color, but that's another lesson.

For this lesson in basic color correction, I'm going to be looking at basic correction and under curves, just these RGB curves. When you're looking at this, the white dot has to do with your white point and your black point. Another way of saying that would be this top dot is the brightest point on your clip, and the bottom dot is the darkest shadow on your clip—the brightest highlight, the darkest shadow.

Working with RGB Color Channels

When it comes to the colors, these are dividing up your colors into video color fields of red, green, and blue. This is highlight and this is shadow, but it also works with it as a color wheel. For example, moving this down would bring me into more of a green tone. Double-clicking here resets that.

Let's just take a look at this overall. If I'm looking at this graph, the first thing I can say is I am definitely underexposed. I need to bring up the shadows, so I can just simply go like that. Notice how this has been boosted and now you're within range. I can also go under basic correction and I could boost up the blacks a bit.

Adjusting Blue Channel and Exposure

Interestingly, you'll see that this color blue is the culprit. Let's revisit my curves and look at blue and just go to the bottom of this blue line and just boost that up vertically. I'm missing a lot of the more complex mid-tones and the higher tones of brightness here and color gradation.

If I'm going to work with my white point, dark point, and basically you could look at this just as being exposure, I want to just boost this up a little bit here. You'll notice how everything is being boosted uniformly—the higher range of your exposure are being boosted. If I want this to be uniformly lighter towards the highlight spectrum, maybe I want to just boost the mid-tones in general, just give it an overall boost.

Saturation and White Balance Corrections

Visiting our vectorscope here, I had mentioned before how the saturation is a little bit off. I can just lower the saturation a bit. You'll notice how this now has corrected itself within range. There's also something called white balance. I'm actually going to remove the attributes of this first so that you can see it without anything on it.

So let's white balance him. Eyedropper—let's just choose something that should be white. Whenever you have a tint over your footage, white balance will correct that. This clip, to uniformly lower the highlights, you would go down vertically. To uniformly boost the shadows, you would go up vertically.

Fine-Tuning Lighting and Contrast

I find this to be a little washed out. I would like more light here. I'm going to go right here and just give this some overall good lighting. Maybe I just want to have a little kind of definition in the shadows—I'm going to bring that down.

Let's look at these buttons. Exposure—you can see what's happening. There are blocks here. I could lower the shadows of those legs. This is like literally pinpointing those areas. You could boost that here. Contrast over here—we are moving into the blue range. Maybe I want to stay more within this warm tone. Here's my temperature. I'm going to move this over away from the blue, maybe try to stay right on that line. We're going to be doing a class on this skin line and examining what that's about.

I hope you've enjoyed this introduction to basic color correction in Premiere Pro. This has been Margaret with Noble Desktop.