Last week, Robbie Carman presented a seminar on color grading and color correction in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Robbie covered a lot of useful and interesting material, both in the main presentation and in the question-and-answer segment at the end.
Here’s a brief outline of what Robbie talked about, as well as some links to more information about each subject:
recommended resources and contact information
- Robbie’s website and books
- Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
- Color Correction Handbook
- Robbie on Twitter
- bug-report/feature-request form
- how to keep up with Premiere Pro and communicate with the Adobe Premiere Pro team
scopes and monitoring video
- importance of monitoring video with scopes
- setting up a color correction workspace
- using the Reference Monitor panel
- choosing a display mode in the Source Monitor or Program Monitor panel
- YC Waveform scope
- adjusting contrast with the YC Waveform scope
- Vectorscope
- RGB Parade scope
basic color correction effects, correcting for exposure and color cast
- adjusting color and luminance using curves
- correcting a dark clip using levels in the Fast Color Corrector effect
- importance of noise removal after some color adjustments (Robbie recommends Magic Bullet Denoiser and ABSoft Neat Video.)
- broadcast-safe colors and limiting to broadcast-safe colors with the Luma Corrector effect
- removing a color cast with the Three-Way Color Corrector effect
- introduction to Three-Way Color Corrector effect and Fast Color Corrector effect
correcting skin color
- importance of previewing on an external video monitor, not just a computer screen
- introduction to secondary color correction, the adjustment of only some colors and parts of the image, not the whole image
- using the “skin tone” line on the vectorscope to correct and grade skin colors
- discussion of bug in Premiere Pro CS5.5.1 on Mac OSX v10.7 (Lion) that causes eyedroppers to not work correctly (A fix for this bug is being worked on, and the availability of such a fix will be announced on this blog.)
grading sky colors, cleverly using the Titler to create mattes
- using the Pen tool in the Titler to draw the boundary of a matte (Jarle Leirpoll shows this technique in a color grading tutorial on PremierePro.net.)
- using the Track Matte Key effect to apply the matte
- using blending modes to blend original sky with underlying color layer
vignettes in After Effects, and introduction to Color Finesse
- using Dynamic Link to send video to After Effects for color work
- introduction to Color Finesse, included with After Effects
- creating a mask for use as a vignette
miscellaneous questions and answers
- resizing a panel to full-screen using the accent (`) key
- meaning of icons for effects in Effects panel
- brief discussion of CUDA processing (GPU acceleration)
- brief discussion of basic compositing in Premiere Pro
- creating and saving effect presets as part of a workflow to match colors between two cameras
- animating effects using keyframes
- using RED (R3D) Digital Cinema assets
- bug-report/feature-request form
- more on giving feedback for Premiere Pro
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