[music] [Richard Harrington] So this is all about getting better color in Premiere and After Effects. We're going to spend the bulk of our time in Premiere, but I will show you how LUTs get used inside of After Effects, how the Lumetri panel moves into After Effects, and how we do have some color management options in After Effects. Now those of us who've worked in the video graphic design industry here, the two words color management, and on the inside, we kind of giggle because we've also gone to Best Buyer big-box stores and looked at 50 televisions tuned to the same thing and said there's no goddamn thing as color management. Okay. So it's a good try is all I'm going to say. It's like you did your part and embedded the right information, and what the manufacturers do or the person with the remote control does to screw it up ain't your fault, but at least you can go, "I did my job." And so we'll talk about a little bit color management and embedding the right information.

My name's Richard Harrington. I'm a certified instructor for Adobe, as well as have my own production and consulting business. I'm actually the train-the-trainer trainer. So it's my job to teach other Premiere Pro trainers how to teach Premiere Pro. So I've been at this a while, I have strong opinions. I like to teach people. I do not work for Adobe. So any feature request or bug you tell me will just warrant a sympathetic nod. So go downstairs and tell Adobe because telling me will not change it. We're going to cover how to read scopes, just the high level so that everybody knows how useful they are. We're going to create custom LUTs and Looks, and I'll explain the difference between a LUT and a Look because a Look is an Adobe specific LUT that can contain extra information. We will go ahead and work with log footage, and I'll show you why I love it. We'll talk about some color-managed workflows. And kind of go through some of those different pieces. My name is Rich Harrington. I'll just do this super fast, where photography, video, and AI overlap, that's been my entire professional career. I started my career as a journalist. I adopted technology very early on. I've been writing books and producing videos for many years. Hopefully, some of you I've helped, but I also am a hands-on creative myself. And lately, I've been designing lots of software to try to take my knowledge and bake it into products. But through the years, maybe you bought a book that you never read and put on your bookshelf, and you had intentions to get better. Today, you get the live show, it's way more sarcastic. It moves a lot faster, but it'll be fun. Okay. So this is what I do. And from time to time, TV stations bring me in to redesign their workflows. And I have served on advisory boards as well as product designers for some of the products you see on the right. Okay. That's that. Last thing before we jump on in, if you want to jot this down or take screenshot. I'll put the next one up as well. We do have an awesome virtual event coming up at the end of the year. It's free. So you are free to watch. It's, it's going to be five days of Premiere Pro training. And if you want to do the After Effects side, that's going to happen in the spring, you can sign up to get notified when classes start going live. Again, it's totally free. A lot of great trainers are just going to be putting on stuff to kind of help you through the boring cold winter months. So there is no cost unless you want to download the stuff. You can watch for free, and it's a great week. Okay? All right. Let's jump in. So I know a little bit about you and the general feeling of the audience, as well as you know a little bit about each other, we're going to play a very short game called What's your Expertise with Premiere Pro. Judgment-free zone, be totally honest. Okay, zero to two years, but you love this product. You're deep into it. Okay. Good. Good morning and welcome.

Three to five years.

Okay. That's most of the room. Good.

Six to ten? Okay. That is the vast majority. Good. You guys are successfully read. And you've been using Premiere Pro before it was Pro. Isn't it so much nicer now that they have a budget? So, yeah, it's great that Premiere has grown so much through the years, and it's really versatile. And lastly, I stayed up or out too late.

Okay. If you didn't raise your hand, tonight is the night, no matter what, you have to do that. Just go to the party, have fun, dig in. If you don't have fun and balance out all the knowledge, then it won't stick. Okay? Left side, right side. Okay. We'll welcome. We're going to talk right about the Lumetri color panel, but this is something I just want to get out of the way right away which is a workflow no matter if you're using your cell phone to correct color or the highest end suite, okay? And this is really important. First up, evaluate the shot within comparison of what's around it. So many people just correct one shot at a time, and they never look at what comes before or after it. Okay. It's shot to shot color correction. We take things that were shot at different times of day, potentially by different cameras and different people, and we weave them together to tell a seamless story. If you do everything individually, it feels like a patchwork quilt, okay? Unfortunately, when people say things like nice editing, unless they actually are a fellow industry professional who has a job that involved editing at some point, it basically means that your editing stood out, and the best editing is invisible. Our job is a little bit thankless because it's our job to weave everything together so seamless that people never notice the craft and instead notice the story. Okay. So box gone. Next, we fix exposure. We fix exposure first because unless you happen to use a color corrector that I invented that unfortunately only works on photo, you always get shifts in color when you change exposure. As you brighten a shot, it loses saturation and vibrance. As you darken a shot, it gets more intense. Color will always change when you change exposure. Exposure will pretty much never change when you change color. So if you change color first and then you change exposure, you're just going to be changing the color again. So this is why we fix it.

Then adjust your color, your saturation. Look at the surrounding shots again. This is where the ability to do compare view comes in handy. And then if needed, grade or stylize based on the story needs, add emotional color. Number one mistake that people make is try to do color correction and color grading in the same pass. These are two completely different things. Fix the shot, then stylize the shot, or bring it into the story because rarely will a producer or a director or a client offer a qualified opinion about color correction. So by correcting the shots first and getting everything technically perfect, when they start throwing out comments about the aesthetics or the feel, which is their right, as a producer or a director or a storyteller or a DP, you could react very quickly and take advantage of adjustment layers. And refine an entire scene with one adjustment rather than this thing. If you're using copy paste attributes to color correct, you're doing it wrong, okay? It's a great effect, but it leads to accidentally stacking color corrections multiple times and getting unexpected results. It is kind of like A minus level work, and you're so close to the right idea, but then you have throw this whole knowledge away and go up to here and start to do something a little more advanced. Okay. Putting that aside. The Lumetri color panel's great. It is something I had a chance to work on. I really love this tool. You can tell me there are better color correctors out there, but I will tell you that for balance of ease of use and power, I think Lumetri is the best one. And most people never take the time to learn how it works. So let's go through a couple things here. And you've got your basics, your creative, your curves, your color wheels, your secondary. So if we start at the top and work our way to the bottom, this is on purpose, okay? We want to start at the very top of the shot and look at it. Now I'm going to open up our scopes here on the left for a moment and switch by clicking on the gear icon, and I'm going to use the one scope that if you know nothing about scopes, you should always use. And it's the one that if you know a lot about scopes, you should still always leave open. It's the RGB parade. And it's basic, but it totally works because what it tells you is if you have video that's too bright and too saturated, like I do here, or too dark, it gives you a floor and a ceiling.

It also shows you if your RGB channels are out of whack and you got a bad white balance, okay? Simplest thing in the world. Look at this temperature slider here, guys. Temperature is the balance of red versus blue effectively. See how it's changing. All right? So this eyedropper is just trying to cheat and get those things balanced for you.

Sad thing is that the auto button works better than the eyedropper. Just use the auto button, okay? It's because... And it's not its fault. Eyedroppers are inaccurate because they take a sample of a few pixels. And the reality is, is that you should be looking at the entire scene to average out white, not a 3x3 square pixels, okay? All eyedroppers suck. This one is just particularly noticeable. Okay. Tint is going to change the balance of the greens versus the reds and blues. By the way, if you ever screw something up, just you can double-click on the individual slider to reset it to the default value. You don't have to sit there and fiddle or type in the number. Just double click, it resets. Okay. So that's the basics of this here. And we're going to talk more about the other scopes, but notice we start with getting the right white balance That's good to do first, and that's just there so you don't drive yourself crazy. Then we're looking at things like, "Okay. I got a white point here that's really intense. Let me lower that white point a bit." Later, we can clamp it if we need to, but I'm just sort of getting that white point below a 100, and it took a while. By the way, number one thing people don't know about this panel, it doesn't stop at 100. You can keep dragging till negative 150. So you actually can go past that amount if you had to. There's a little extra headroom there. It's like only people who know click on the numbers. Similarly if I need to deal with the highlights there, I could drive those into place. Sometimes I'm going to take the highlights down to recover more, but actually open the whites back up. That's another thing that people often miss.

Your highlights in white point and shadows in black point should be pulled in opposite directions unless you're trying to go for a very flat look. So the whites are the brightest part of the image, and the highlights are the next zone down. If you pull them all down, you get a less contrasting image. If you stretch them apart, you get more contrast. And no matter what anybody tells you, everybody likes contrast, it adds depth, it adds perception, it makes it look more engaging. I'm not going to say crank the contrast slider. I'm going to tell you to expand the dynamic range, the difference between the lightest and darkest elements. Similarly, if I bring up the shadows and I take the black point in the opposite direction, I still have a nice, rich image, okay? So just some things to think about. All right. Let's break this down.

The first scope that matters is the waveform.

And the waveform is going to help you kind of see what's going on. I usually just look at a waveform as a luma. And this helps me see the brightness from left to right and top to bottom. So let's just jump into that first scope. So when you click on the Scope menu, you have different options to choose from. There's presets that will quickly arrange multiple scopes on the Window. Okay? It's all there. You guys can download the slides by the way. They put them all up to MAX. Take whatever pictures you want. You do you, but they do make all the slides downloadable. And if for some reason, they don't, they take a little while, just ping me. So you'll be fine. So let's do that first one here. We got our waveform monitor. Notice there how as the object moves through, you can kind of even see it, right? Now it's not drawing the object, but what it's drawing is the brightness. Oh, that really dark there of the window, the really bright there of the front. So the more intense here is brighter and the black is darker. And so as we look at this, we can kind of see what's happening there. Like, as I open up the shadows, you see how the stuff at the bottom stretches out, right? Oh, look, we can see underneath the chassis.

Yeah. There is stuff down there. And then, oh, I don't want the blacks washed out. So let's put a little more black back in, right? So that's kind of what's happening with this scope. It's giving you a visual representation. It's a little bit like a levels histogram, but it's spread out a bit.

Next, we got that vector scope, and vector scope is all about color, okay? Now, in the old days, there were these things called color bars, and they weren't just made to be put on industry nerd t-shirts. They actually did something, okay? And we would put these on the front of our videotapes when we recorded so that when the stuff came back, you were able to actually calibrate before capturing, okay? You would digitize things in. So here's what that did. Bam. Look. It hit all the targets. That's exactly what it was for. It was so that they can color calibrate things and get all the colors to properly line up before they played back the tape or digitized. That's what it was for, okay? So most of you are not converting tape from an analog to a digital format anymore unless you're working with archival things. And it also helped us take a look at the waveform monitor, and all of these different luminosity bars hit every single target that was baked into the scope. So that's the history.

Just like the reason why we have the crazy frame rates we have them is because it's tied to the electrical frequencies of what was running through houses so that things wouldn't flicker.

It's weird, but shocking concept. Technology decisions from 80 years ago still impact you today.

So...

Your scopes have all of these targets built in that we're trying to hit. But where it really comes down to is it helps us see if there's a problem. So here, I can see that the green is out of control. Now to make that easier, when you bring up your scopes, don't work so hard because there's a few things we can do. Let's turn off the parade. Let's turn off the waveform. First up, you've got the ability here to go to brightness. Go to bright, make it easier to see. Additionally, if you double click, it'll punch into the middle.

This line, we're going to work with later. It's used for flesh tones, but look at this green here. Do you see how I get, like, totally ran through the electric fence? Pretend this is a perimeter. And anything that's past it is a big problem. Okay? Now don't pretend and know that this is a perimeter and anything that goes past it as a problem. So in fact, we kind of want to keep it inside of this zone if we can. So what I would do is apply a simple curve which is what I did here, but let's just go ahead and turn that off for a second.

Using the curve here, I can say, hey, I want to select a problem zone, and we're going to fix that. So let's just go ahead and reset this whole adjustment for a moment.

And what we're going to do is come on into the green here and just target the green.

And I'll pull down the saturation of the green.

See, I just picked the green zone. And as I pull that in, look at how the green lost its saturation or intensity.

Now the shot's fixed.

See, here's the thing.

If you only create video for the web, you've probably never had a scary person who's worked in video forever come up and yell at you. They're called an engineer. And their job is to make sure that the video that goes out doesn't have technical problems because video that has technical problems like this can cause everything from audio noise to things to get rejected or refuse to play back, encoding errors, all sorts of things. You never would have saw that the green was problematic unless you looked at it on a scope. And by the way, video changes over time. So you watch your sequence in slow motion, or like, bam, that blue is totally wackadoodle. Now we talked about the RGB parade. This is super simple. Watch. So I knew that the blue was problematic. I didn't know the blue was that problematic, okay? So what we're going to do here, and I'd actually pushed it to make it even worse, is we're going to just fix that using a basic white balance. Hey, let's go ahead and balance out the blue a bit. And remember, we can keep dragging just because the slider stops. Look at that. It doesn't really stop. That one goes to 999. So you can force it into the right zone. Now in this case, we got some other problems with this footage. This is footage from the land of DV. This is crap footage, okay? But we got it fixed dramatically closer to where it should be. Then I would take a look at things like, oh, wow, these bright areas here are out of whack, right? Why are those buildings pink? Those shouldn't be pink. I'd come down to curves. And in this case, we're going to do a simple adjustment. Hey, there's too much color in the bright areas. Things that are bright are also referred to as luma.

Color is also basically referred to as two components, all three technically. But in this case, I'm just going to desaturate the highlights. So if I take my eyedropper and click, look, it added a control point there, and it said, hey, that was where your highlight started. And now holding down the Shift key so it doesn't go too far out of whack, I could just pull down the saturation there in the highlights.

I can come over a little bit.

I don't know what they're doing next door, but they're loud. I hope we're just as loud.

Okay. All right. There we go. And what we could do there is strip out some of that extra color there in the highlights. See? So it just took it out. So that kind of normalized that. And then similarly here, this color here is really bothering me. So I'm going to say, hey, hue versus luma and click on it. And this is where you're like, "Oh, man, how do I work with this?" That's why there's a scroll bar, guys. So you can move it. All right. I want that area to just get a little darker. There we go. Let's get a little bit richer shadows there, so that starts to come along. Cool. Hey, luma versus saturation. Bam. Cool. All right, I'm just going to come here, and in the shadows, we're going to pull that out a little bit. See? That's the concept. Now, I can keep fighting with this shot, or I can go on to a more practical example, but I just wanted you to see how the scopes plus the curves get a whole lot done. Is this clicking for everybody? Making sense? Okay. So you just pick your target, and then the Shift key is a great modifier key. It keeps the curve point from moving all over the place because when the curve starts moving left to right, you get color shifting. And then you feel like, "I hate curves. They're so hard." Just hold on the Shift key, and it will just drag it on one axis. And life is a lot simpler when all you have is one axis, After Effects with one dimension. You'd be like, render, done, okay? So one axis is not hard. Three axes is where life gets really confusing. And so by locking it in, it's much, much easier. Okay. Next one. Here, let's just zoom in a little bit. We got our program effect, right? We got our ability to sort of see things in both directions. So if we've got an effect applied and I hit the thing, I see what the footage looked like originally. I pressed the F key. On the right here, I see the whole effect applied. But, obviously, I gave this an aesthetic look.

Invariably, the client or the customer or someone's going to say, "Can you show me what it looks like?" Never reset your effect, okay? Instead, click on a thing that does not look like a switch or a button or anything else. It's the little FX, and you could turn the effect on or off without resetting it, okay? Just do that, and it's much simpler. By the way, if you've done all of this work and come up with a look, and you say, "Wow, I really need to use that in a whole bunch of places, right? Like, I've done a whole recipe here, and I've done some additional curves and creative, and we've pulled it down, and we applied a film stock and all of that," you can click right here and choose Export.

And what I'm going to do is I'll even put the vignette in there a little bit, right? And now I'm going to export what's called a Look, which is an Adobe specific LUT, okay? So we'll call this street LUT.

Bam. So now when the client says something like, "Oh, it's just a little too much. Or could you use that on another shot that was very similar?" I'm just going to blow this away, come down here to the creative section and load that browse. Street look. Bam. Look. It's got all the settings in it, yet we still have everything now independent. We can still work with that. Oh, let me just brighten the edges a little bit. Darken them a little bit more. Oh, you know what? A little bit more, a little bit less. It took your entire color corrector and baked it into a preset that's still flexible and you still have all your editing controls now released. So you could take any adjustments you've made in the Lumetri effect and bake them into a Look. And that includes all the stuff down here like vignettes. And that's why you load it into the Look area because it's an aesthetic adjustment at that point. And as you go from shot to shot and you are shooting the same street footage for, like, two hours, the lighting's going to change. You might make small adjustments on the camera. With a single slider of the intensity, you can make that a little more or a little less and still deal with it and have the ability on every other shot to just hit the Auto button, right? So it's like, oh, hey, let me fix this. Boom. Auto button. There we go. Let me come down to creative. Browse, right? And we're just going to load that again.

There we go. See? And I'm still free to say, wow, those shadows were really muddy. Let me lift the shadows up and recover the highlights a bit. And just open that. See? So you still have that flexibility to start to match. Okay. Another thing that's awesome is the use of adjustment layers. So your adjustment layers are over here, check new, toss on an adjustment layer. Now every effect can go on top of every other. And that's where you put your creative looks, okay? So pretty straightforward. And lastly, Comparison View. Comparison view is really useful. Here, I have two shots from the same scene, right? But look at the trees. They're close, but they don't match.

So over here, there's normally a little plus button. We've discovered that for some reason when you plug in an external monitor, it disappears, but you all see that plus button. It's like they want it to be hard. Okay. Normally, it'll be right there. When you click it, you'll get a little window with extra buttons you could drag up, and you're going to want to drag up this one here called Comparison View. If you forget where it is under color wheels and match, there's also a button called Comparison View.

So now you could park this cursor on a shot and then have a shot you're working with over here.

And look, I can go with a split screen.

Can you all see that the trees don't match now? They're close, but-- Right? All right. Aesthetically, what's wrong? It's not dramatic, but tiny bit. What's a little off? Anyone? Yeah. The shadows are a little bright. And the green's just a little off, right? So I'm going to go into the shadows here, right, and pull a little bit.

Put a little more blue into the shadows, right? And I'm going to put a little more gold into the highlights for the sun.

And then I'm going to say, "Hey. Let's get that black point a little bit darker.

Oh, the color's just a little too intense. Let's back off that vibrance." See how we're starting to get to a match now, right? So you could sit there and play with it until you do match. I'm going to put a little bit more orange or sunlight into my shadows or my highlights there.

And so that split screen view is so useful. And you can do it either way, so you can start to compare things until you feel like you're getting a good match.

Now don't drive yourself nuts color correcting trees from one shot to the next when the client hasn't reviewed the story yet. This is something you do at the very end. Like, when you're waiting for feedback and you posted the video and you're waiting for them to comment on it, okay? I said this yesterday, I'll say it again, get to the rough cut as fast as possible. This is where you're going to find out that the video is too long or things are missing or they forgot to tell you something. This is what you do when you're waiting for feedback, and you want to be a perfectionist, and you want to really make it look its best, okay? But comparison view is totally useful, and it's totally hidden because there's no button for it, and it's off by default, okay? So that allows you-- And by the way, if you're feeling like you're struggling over here under that comparison view, under our options here from this, we actually have the ability, I'm going to turn off face detection, to just click apply match. And it's going to try really hard on its own to match the shadows, mid tones, and highlights for you. And it did a pretty good job. Not perfect. I'll just put a little bit more blue into the shadows, and I'm good. So that button there uses your split screen. And will attempt to match them like it did there. So that's a really good hidden button that's one, two, three, four sections down and close by default. Just jumps right at you, right? It's just there.

Okay. Everyone good with scopes? You guys feel like you can get some use out of them now? They're not just a mystery? Okay. Good. Let's go forward.

So vector scope is color. That works well.

We talked about how it hits the targets. That's really straightforward. It helps us calibrate. There are two types of vector scopes. That's pretty straightforward. Histogram, not as useful, but some people prefer it. It's going to sort of show you your brightness values. Waveform is very useful. You can look at it as just luminosity, or you can look at it with color information woven in. Okay. Pretty easy. And that kind of helps you hit those targets. Okay. Let's talk real quickly about workspaces. So by default, Premiere Pro is set up so you can work. And there's all those workspaces that make it easy. Like, hey, I'm in color workspace. Go ahead and reset to the saved layout. Put everything back exactly the same. But invariably, you might want to tweak things or make a change, or maybe you don't want your audio panel in here. So you choose to undock it, right? There's different things. You can go in and hide things. Or maybe you want to make more room for the scopes and don't need as much over here. And you wish that the default was that you had these open, right? Well, then what you can do is go under workspace and say, "save as new workspace." And then when you want to load it, you can have all your windows laid out the way you want. So workspaces are very personal. Additionally, if you save a project, there's an option when you have import, if you import one Premiere Pro project into another, in the import dialogue, there's an option called import workspaces. So this is one of the easiest ways if you have to change rooms to bring your workspace with you. You can make a default Premiere Pro project, set up the way you want with your sequence presets, your bin presets for organization, your workspaces, put that on a thumb drive, especially if you're a freelancer, back up your keyboard shortcuts to that. And then when you get thrown in another room, you don't have to play that half hour game of changing all your settings and getting there early on the first day because an artist can't work without their tools, right? So you don't have to spend all that time reconfiguring things. You just have a project with a thumbstick, with your keyboard shortcut, your workspaces, and everything you need. Plug it in and it's, like, great. The guitar is tuned. I'm ready to go. Okay.

Next, LUTs.

LUTs are straightforward. Many people assign them magical powers. They have no magical powers. They are better than a Preset. They are not wonderful. They solve problems. LUTs are designed to help us quickly calibrate things and people get confused by them. So LUTs can be used to convert things from one color space to another or to encapsulate a stylized adjustment or both.

What happens is, is the LUT pushes the color value into different directions, okay? So the LUT transforms the color. The reason why we refer to it as a cube is that things are working on three axes, okay? Now what happens here is you should think about a node or a layer approach, okay? First, prepare the shot, color correction, kind of get things in the right ballpark. Then apply the LUT. The LUT could be stylistic. The LUT could be converting things from one color space to another. Like, hey, we shot on Fuji film in log, and I want to get it all converted to Rec 2020 or Rec 709 because I'm delivering a broadcast piece. Then afterwards, you fine tune.

Most people do three passes when they're refining their color. Get it in the right ballpark, transform it so that it is accurate and then finesse it to solve problems that they could have solved on set if they had more time and more money or more skill. Okay. I already showed you how to create a LUT in Premiere Pro. You just click on the Lumetri effect, and you can export it and save your file out. I am going to show you how to do it in Photoshop as well, but let's open up some LUTs. All right. Here we go. I'm going to switch this to list view.

So here, we have some S-Log footage from Sony, okay? There's lots of flavors of S log. There's lots of options. I'm going to go into comparison view and turn it off for a second. Here we go. So when you look at this, you're seeing, wow, that's really washed out, okay? Well, we're going to talk more about log in a moment, but what we need to do is apply some basic correction.

So what I'll do is browse. And you see that, like, only a couple of these are preloaded, the RA, the Phantom, the Alexa, but you can browse. And I suggest you visit your camera manufacturers because they all have downloadable LUTs that you can choose to download. They're all going to have different things. So for example, if I go here, you see I have an S log folder. Where did I get it? Sony's website. Just search for the LUTs that are made for your camera. Every camera manufacturer has a place you could download it. This morning, I found the secret iPhone LUT for when you shoot log on the new iPhone, they actually have a LUT under the Apple developer website. You have to make a developer account to access it because apparently, logs are only for people who know how to code, but it's there.

And so here we go. And it's just a web search. I just typed in iPhone LUT, Apple developer, and then you log in with your Apple ID. It's free to create a developer account. There's cool tutorials up there, but they had a LUT that was actually quite good because it's official. All right. So here, oh, S-Log2, which is what I shot. Okay. There's different flavors of S-Log. Take it from S-Log2 to Rec 709. And they had four different recipes including a Sine 1. So now with one click, we're getting into the general target zone that Sony assigns to that space, higher dynamic range for cinema, browse, a more traditional Rec 709 for broadcast. And you can see there that it quickly got things into the right zone of saturation and color. You're still free to now hit the Auto button. And at this point, you should be damn close to what you need, okay? That's the issue. And I say, hey, you know what, the white balance is just a little off. Let's get the red to blue balance there. Good. And I just want a little richer in the shadows. Nice. And take the white point down slightly. All right. We're in the ballpark. See, that's that idea of applying the LUT tied to the manufacturer. Now, additionally, if you've corrected something, as we talked about, you can click up here and you can export that as a LUT or a Look. The only difference is that the Look can include the creative adjustments down here which can include things like sharpening and other types of things, and it can include the vignette. By the way, most people never knew this. It's totally there. Look, there is actually sharpness in the video. And you'll see this if you punch into 100%, and make sure you're at full quality. So the sharpness can really help with those edges. Do you see that just pop? Don't be afraid to apply sharpness. Sharpness is not for out of focus video. It's for compression caused by the codecs or the sensors when it's writing the file or when we decompress it. It is very normal to apply a little bit of sharpness. And if you're not, you're totally missing out because this one's real time. I mean, like, it doesn't have, like, a render time to it. It's amazing. It's like a GPU accelerated sharpening algorithm. If we would have had this five years ago, we would have been, like, singing the praises, but now everyone's so jaded that they don't realize the power of that. It's just buried under creative because somehow a sharpening adjustment is considered creative as opposed to technically need it on every single shot. Okay. Once you've done that, if you bake that into a Look with the Adobe format, then it's very easy to reuse that and carry that over. So you can just export a look.

Let me go ahead and call that crafts.

Here we go.

And then when you get to your next shot, you could load that as a creative look.

Bam, get it in the right ballpark, still hit the Auto button as needed. And now your shots are much closer matched. And then if you really need to cheat, come on down to your auto match. Go to Comparison View and just park the frame on the one you want to use and click Apply Match. And it will tweak your shadows, midtones, and highlights a little bit if needed. See, it took a while to analyze, but it did. Look how those are perfectly matched. Cheat, guys, okay? Your knowledge is getting the first one fixed. It's not doing it 20 more times. Be the genius inventor and then save time. Just bake these things in, get it done, okay? Cool. Everybody understand what happened there? Like, how we were able to do that? Same thing, black magic is going to have input LUTS that you can get browse and I'm just going to go over here to my black magic design LUTs, and you'll find that they also have LUTs. There's also some nice third party ones and then you could start to apply that. Now I'm going to turn off the display Color Management here and the auto tone mapping. And you're going to see here that there's a few things like there's some interesting color space conversion going on. We're going to talk about this in a moment of how we can convert things. But as we look at this here, let's just go ahead and reset that for a second. There we go. So we can load in those LUTs from the manufacturer if we need to and start to convert our color spaces, right? And then adjust the intensity of that, okay? Get a little transformation. Okay. We're going to talk about what's happening here in a moment with Color Management. That's one of the things that's really changed. And last thing I'm going to point out is if you like Photoshop and know your way around, it's really easy to click that plus button and add export frame. Kick it out. That's great. All imported into the project, nice and simple. And now I'll just open that in Photoshop, okay? And you could just choose to edit in Adobe Photoshop. When you do this, make sure that it's a flattened layer, flattened image.

Now you can use all the wonderful tools in Photoshop. I showed this yesterday. You hold on the Option key. It's a secret button. You click Auto, and you're going to be able to get access like per color channel contrast snap neutral midtones, which is like an instant color cast neutralizer. You can come on over here to other adjustments and they say like, hey, HSL. Grab the silly on image tool. Click on the green to target it. Oh, I want to increase the saturation or decrease the saturation of the lizard and make the green a little darker. And let's click here on this color, it picked the red and the gold, I want to make that a little browner and a little less saturated so it's not detracting from the lizard and a little darker. And I want to click over here on the blues, and I want to make that a little more saturated and a little brighter. Look at how we graded there. Oh, I have a LUT that I want to use. Let me toss on a lookup table here. And I'm going to be lazy and just use Fujifilm film stock that's built right in.

And, oh, yeah, I want to finish that, though, so that our contrast is in there. So let's toss on another curve, grab the same orange tool, click on the shadows and pull down, click on the highlights and lift up.

See what we did there? All simple on image tools. Get the job done.

File, Export, Color Lookup Table, put it in with the same name as the shot itself so it's easy to find. Sixteen points is fine. If you're a control freak, go to medium. You never need to go more. Hit okay. Pick your location where you're going to store those.

Save it. Bam. Now in Premiere Pro, super easy. Just go on into your creative section, browse, and you can go right to it, right? There's my shot. Boom. And I got that look applied right away with all of that aesthetic goodness very easily. See? So Photoshop is a wonderful tool for creative color grading. It's a tool that lots of people feel comfortable in. It's a tool that still has a budget that's probably ten times the size of the Premiere team's budget. And it also has all these tools for people who want to get stuff done but don't actually know how to do it. And that's okay. Photoshop is for everybody. It also has really complex things too. Let's not sell it short, but those on image tools are incredible. I've been begging for years to get those things in Premiere. You mean, I could just click on things and, like, go up and down and change. We kind of got there with the curves, but that was like this Curves panel on steroids. Did you see how every single tool had that great on image tool? It's called the targeted adjustment tool. It makes no sense whatsoever. It looks like a little finger. It either points this way or this way. It's also in Lightroom. It has a completely different icon. It does the same thing. So who knew that a company could have different icons for the same thing across four products, even when it's owned by one shareholder? Does it work with Lightroom? Yes, it does work with Lightroom. You can't export. You can't export anything out of Lightroom. Yeah. There is third party stuff. If you really want to use Lightroom, but Lightroom was made because Photoshop scared people.

Go to Photoshop. Just bake down. Photoshop was co invented by John Knoll visual effects lead at industrial light and magic. It's been a video tool since day one. Ninety-eight percent of people who do video use Photoshop. My very first book was Photoshop for Nonlinear Editors. Trust me when I tell you your professional career will be better for knowing Photoshop. Okay. Didn't think I was going to go soapbox twice, but thank you. All right. Adjustment layers for scene correction. All right. Let's jump forward here. I want to talk about Color Management. And I want to talk really quickly about log. We mentioned adjustment layers, though. You can throw it over the whole scene and toss on the effect to multiple clips. Now with log really quick, I just want to take two minutes to explain log as a concept.

Log is misunderstood. Log is a choice that makes it easier to mix brands of cameras or different directors of photography and videographers together in one timeline. Log is what every editor probably asks for because it's easier for them to fix. But it's what almost nobody understands, and it gets botched up. And if the client looks at an uncorrected image on set, they're having heart palpitations because the footage looks so bad. And so you have to make sure that the crew knows how to deal with it. But even the iPhone can shoot log for God's sakes. You switch to ProRes and can shoot log. You can shoot log uncompressed now out the SSD port on the iPhone and plug in a 4 terabyte SSD and have 12 hours of 4K recording. It's insane, okay, in log. So what happens is every log's a little different, but basically it lifts the shadows and compresses the highlights and makes it much more difficult to clip a shot. So you don't have to worry about lost detail, okay? We can add contrast in. We can't remove contrast if it's already in the shot too much. It's easy to add. It's hard to subtract. So different logs will have a different curve, but basically it's protecting your footage. So log looks like a mistake. But it's very easy to bring everything back to the shot. Log is a safety net, okay? So when we shoot log, we don't have to worry about the black in her jewelry disappearing into the shirt. We could push that. We don't have to worry about the glints getting clipped. We can affect this very easily. We could bring back the color. We can bring back the full dynamic range. Log is just a safety net, and every manufacturer has their own log and usually more than one flavor. And some logs are better for outdoor shooting where you have more dynamic range and some are better for controlled studio shooting. Just read the manual that came with your camera or go on any forum where production people come together and you will find a religious war, but there's some trends. Okay. Lastly, when you are shooting log, take advantage of that log, it's going to really help you preserve those highlights. And again, there's lots of flavors out there. And while you're at it, learn how to use focus speaking because everything looks in focus on the back of your camera. Turn on focus speaking. It will save you. All right. So here we go. So when we have log in our timeline, it can get a little bit challenging. So we talked about that idea of S log. Here's a good example, right? I can go and apply a LUT, and that's fine. I can go here and bake that in. And if your intention is that you have to hand off to somebody else, and that somebody else is just going to open the project, or they're going to take it into another tool to do more work. Putting the log files and the LUTs in the project folder and getting it all organized and having the LUTs named and the adjustment layer over the scene where you've got a log doing some of the LUTs doing some of the work, that's great because it makes it easy to hand off.

So we could take this here, and I could say, hey, go ahead and apply the basic Sony log here. I'll go to my S log folder, in this case, choose something. And instantly, we start to get back into the right zone. With the click of Auto there, see how it pushed things a little bit more. So the log itself just converts it to the general color space. And then you still make adjustments. But here's the thing, and this is the thing that's brand new.

I should say not brand new, but relatively new and easy to miss. There's a Settings tab under Lumetri now. And these settings all existed before, they were just spread out in about six different areas, and you had to know which ones to go to and do them in the right order. That's pretty much impossible. And the whole philosophy of the Essential Sound panel on the Lumetri panel is you start at the top and you work to the bottom until you run out of time or you give up or you start to cry. That's it. Okay. I helped design the other one. We're just like, guys, here's the thing. Lightroom was invented for people who were afraid of Photoshop. Let's just make a color corrector so that people do things in the right order and put them in the right order and don't make them go hunting through menus to pick out the same six things for every shot. It's the same thing here. Hey. I want to do display Color Management and then fix the dynamic range. Now, I'm not sure if your display there is going to update yet, but hopefully it will. Let's refresh. And then what we can do is we could say, hey, I want to override the color space of the media. And start to assign the correct color space. And so do you see the picture changing, I hope, on this projector? Okay. Good. So I could have Rec 709, and then I can look at my Sequence settings here. Let's just select the Sequence. And set that to convert it to the correct color space, right? So I could be looking here. Okay. I got ProRes, that's fine. My color space is, I'm doing Rec 2100. There we go. And so now it's going to automatically convert to the working color space. And if you need to, you can also override it and it's going to basically automatically do that conversion or scene aware. And so while this looks strange to you here, it's going to allow you to kind of know what's happening in the sequence and do the general conversion. So this makes it easy for you to set up the Project Settings for HDR, or to deal with log footage, even if we're working in Rec 709.

It can automatically ensure that the correct general color space is being applied to the footage. And so it's going to detect the log footage, and it will start to convert. I got another project or another thing here set up for that. It's going to get a little easier. Here we go. So in this case, my working color space is Rec 709, standard HD color, okay? And I overrode the media color space, so it's using the correct Sony log. So in here, they already had presets built in for Canon, Panasonic, and Sony. So I was able to apply the correct log format, and it auto mapped my log footage without me having to go every single time I had a piece of log footage and apply a LUT just to convert it. Does everybody understand the time-saving nature of this buried setting that's still intimidating 'cause it has way too many acronyms? Short version, turn on Display Color Management, enable Dynamic Range, okay? Over here is where if you're going out an external monitor, you can configure that and how it goes out to the monitor. Then look at your project size, what are you delivering? Look at the media space if you need to, and you can override it. And then you've got the ability here to pick from built in logs for Canon, Panasonic, and Sony, as well as general broadcast logs. And it will do the conversion of the footage for you to the correct space. And unlike a LUT, it's processing it earlier in the pipeline so that you could still have all the flexibility of additional adjustments and you're less likely to get clipping. So it's a little bit superior to a LUT workflow because very technical word concatenation, the adjustments are not clipping and then getting pulled down. They're kind of mixing together seamlessly as you make adjustments. And so there's a little bit of a better signal pass. It's happening a little bit more cleanly. It says if it happened in the camera as opposed to in post production. Okay. That's the easiest way of explaining it. There's a white paper if you really want to read about it, but that's the short version. So that's your Lumetri panel with settings. And this is your more advanced options there. Everyone get that? Okay. So now before we come back to one easy thing before you wrap up, let's go to the hard place, After Effects. So in After Effects here, we can also work with log footage, okay? Totally the same thing. By the way, you can also take a piece of footage here. Like, hey, look, I got some iPhone footage. This was all log footage from the iPhone, right, and also HDR footage from the iPhone. So there, hey, go ahead and let me load in what's needed. There's my-- There-- Let me come in and go in and take a look at the sequence, right? I mapped it to Rec 709. That's great. And, oh, yeah, apply to all instances. You do it one time. You click the button. It will find every other type of footage that's from the same camera and fix it with one click. Okay. Now here's something a lot of people don't realize. Let's say you did a bunch of work.

Edit, copy...

Edit, paste. Look, it brings it in. It recreates the sequence. It applies the same adjustments. It did all the other things it brought it across, okay? Pretty simple. Now in After Effects, we have also have a Color Management setting, okay? And it's going to be under your Project Settings.

And you have to do things at the project level. So in this case, we have Adobe color managed, which is a little bit easier and more standard for most people, or you have OCIO, and I'm going to say that wrong, but this is where you can access ACES and some of the more advanced options. ACES is an industry standard that is designed by the academy. It's meant to help exchange color information between different platforms. So like from Resolve to Premiere and everything else. It kind of gives you a universal color space that doesn't have any of the secret sauce or proprietariness of each manufacturer. So if you're color grading in ACES and After Effects or you're color grading in Resolve, they're going to line up as long as you had the same calibrated monitor, you wouldn't see shifting. And the reason why it's in After Effects is it's here more for visual effects. So if we are using ACES, for example, you'll see that there are more other options in here for all sorts of types of workflows. And so you have to assign what's right. This project has got a lot of mixed things in it. So I've got a lot of mixed footage that wouldn't be great. But same idea here. And you'll find working color space here for different types of workflows, okay? All right. So now you have your Color Management. It's pretty straightforward. So let's go into one last thing before we wrap up. And so there's my iPhone HDR footage.

Okay? You have your clip selected. You can still apply the Lumetri color effect. It has all of the same things you're used to, okay? By the way, if this is intimidating, remember, you have an effect search engine over here, L-U-M-E. There we go. Drag drop. Stop hunting through the menus. This is a search engine, okay? So now it's the same tool. It even has the same interface more or less, okay? So I can now browse for that input LUT, and I am going to go to my LUTs.

There we are. And let me get to the right folder of LUTs.

There, there. Boom.

Up, LUTs. And there's my Apple 1. Log to linear, log to Rec 709, okay? Bam. So this was shot on the iPhone in log as ProRes, and I was in a really high glossy environment and I wanted to get the full dynamic range.

I'll tell my father you said that.

Yes. My dad's retired. He built the house he liked.

Now we still have the ability to look at that, like, really recover the shadows, really recover the highlights, but look at the metal and the glint and the richness. This is a freaking iPhone, guys. Log, uncompressed ProRes, really quite nice and we're able to go in and deal with that extended dynamic range there on the highlights and really avoid a whole lot of clipping. So that's the benefit. And by using the color managed flow in the Project Settings, we're able to set that up nicely, okay? So I just wanted you to see that After Effects has a lot of the same tools. So even though we spent a lot of time in Premiere, all those same things we talked about earlier are here. The same curves tools. Hey. I really want to go after a certain zone like these pink flowers control point...

Click, click, and I want to pull down the saturation in that pink just a little bit. It's a little intense. There we go. See? Done.

We targeted just the pink. So realize that these are very powerful, very useful tools. Good? Okay. All right. To wrap things up, there is a lot to Premiere Pro. There's a lot to that color management. Download the deck. It'll walk you through a little bit more how to use that workspace. It'll talk about what each section is. But we walk you through this, the idea of set your Project Settings, then set your clip settings, and assign them to where they're supposed to be. Same thing here. After Effects, you do it at the Project Settings first. So this is a project. It's a delivery. You set Color Management at the project level, and then you could assign things at the sequence level and make other changes. If you're delivering to two totally separate color spaces, when you're done with the edit, duplicate the project and change the Project Settings, and then make the changes before you export, okay? Easy enough. All right. I hope that was helpful. To give you a couple things on the door out, if you guys want to get in touch, I'm not too hard to find. So I work on a couple pieces of software, Mylio and Radiant. My production company's RHED Pixel, and I blog at Photofocus. You can find me on LinkedIn.

If I've ever figured anything out, there's a good chance I publish something for free on it to try to help you. I also have books and other things and videos out there you're welcome to look at. As I mentioned on the way in-- Well, first off, you can get this just stop by booth 0303. This has a cool tool for importing Frame.io, and it's a AI search engine. I'm not going to show it to you, but they'll give you three months downstairs. Just stop by. This is a tool that I designed, and I've been working with this team. And so it's an AI search engine that catalogs all your footage and all of your files and makes everything searchable. Additionally, if you find yourself traveling or you have multiple computers, it lets you sign in on every single device you have, browse what's on every other device, and grab folders on demand as needed, and dynamically sync to the machine you're on. So I have half a million photos and videos on my iPad in a preview format. And then with just a click, I can pull down anything off of my server at home without ever having to log in or do anything else. So go get your free version for three months of playing with it and try it out. And lastly, join us for the Premiere Pro Virtual Summit, totally free to learn and get hands on with some new skills. You can visit this website to sign up for more information and then we'll have the After Effects one in February. Thank you, guys, for coming out and have a great day.

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