(Page 3 of 3 pages for this article  <  1 2 3)

Filed under: GentryMedia Sister Sites •ProVideo Coalition •Post Production •

Streamlining Color Correction in Premiere Pro

Checking color and saturation with the Vectorscope

If you set a proper color balance in the field, your clips probably won’t have obvious color casts. But your eyes can play tricks on you, so it’s good to check your clips’ color using the Vectorscope. 

In the Reference monitor, open the panel menu and choose Vectorscope. This scope shows hue and saturation values in your clip. Choose 100% from the drop-down list (shown at right). That displays the full range of saturation values; from 0% at the center of the scope to 100% at the circumference.

The Vectorscope displays hue and saturation information. Set its display to 100% to show saturation values from zero to 100%.

To get a feel for how the Vectorscope works, create a color bars clip (choose File > New > Bars and Tone), add that to a sequence, and position the Current Time Indicator on it. In the Vectorscope, the color bars show up as dots in the three primary color boxes - red, green, and blue - and in their complementary (secondary) colors - cyan, magenta, and yellow, as seen below:

The Vectorscope (above left) matches the color wheel in terms of color angles. In this example the Vectorscope shows how color bars look. Each color shows up as a dot in its respective color box (the inner boxes represent 75% saturation). The arrow points to the so-called “flesh tone” line.

Note: All the black, white and gray areas in the clip show up as a single dot in the center. They are all desaturated – neutral - so they all fall in the center.

In the Vectorscope there are two sets of color boxes at two distances from the center point. The color bar dots show up in the boxes closest to the center - the 75% saturation zone - which meets the now outdated, broadcast safe standards. However, as with luminance, you don’t have to limit your clips to outdated values.

To demonstrate how an obvious color cast looks in the Vectorscope, I shot the clip in the figure below after taking my color (white) balance from the red wall. That shifted the color cast to the complement of red: cyan. In the figure below, the Vectorscope shows how the colors in the clip are clearly shifted down toward cyan:

The clip has an obvious cyan color cast caused by taking the color balance from the red wall. That color cast shows up in the Vectorscope.

If the color cast is not so obvious, you can get a clearer idea of the cast by limiting the display to a portion of the clip that you know should either be neutral (light gray is best) or flesh tone. To do that, add the Crop effect to the clip and adjust it so it displays only a portion of the clip you want to use to check color cast.

If the clip is properly color balanced and you are viewing a neutral gray area, the Vectorscope trace will be in the center. If the trace is some distance from the center, some color correction is in order.

To check flesh tones, I crop to an individual’s face. Despite the three nationalities represented at the table back on the previous two pages, the Vectorscope sees their flesh tone hues more or less equally due to the red color of blood just beneath the skin. If the Vectorscope trace falls on or close to the so-called flesh tone line, then we’re in good shape.

Adjusting color cast using the Fast Color Corrector

Once you determine the color cast, use can use the Fast Color Corrector’s color wheel to fix it. The color wheel controls hue and saturation for all luminance levels.

Note: The Three-way Color Corrector has four wheels; one each for shadows, midtones and highlights and a fourth “master” wheel that works more or less like the single wheel in the Fast Color Corrector. You use the Three-way Color Corrector’s multiple color wheels when doing secondary color correction.

To remove a color cast, drag the Fast Color Corrector, color wheel’s Balance Magnitude control (the little circle) away from the color cast and toward its complementary color. The farther you drag it, the greater the color shift. The small hash mark, perpendicular to the Balance Angle line, called Balance Gain, sets the relative coarseness or fineness of the Balance Magnitude control.

To fix the cyan color cast in the figure above, I pulled the Balance Magnitude control away from cyan toward red, its complementary color (as shown in the figure below). To check my work, I used the Crop effect to isolate a neutral gray area. In this case, I used the table cloth hanging down from the table as my neutral gray (the tablecloth on the table surface is too bright to get an accurate color cast reading). As you move the color wheel Balance Magnitude control, the goal is to see to it that the Vectorscope trace moves to the center of the scope, meaning you’ve neutralized the color cast.

To remove a color cast, drag the Fast Color Corrector, color wheel’s, Color Magnitude control away from that color. To check your work, use the Crop effect to limit the display to what should be a neutral gray region in the clip. In this case I neutralized a cyan color cast. As I dragged the Color Magnitude control, the Vectorscope trace moved from cyan (toward the bottom right of the scope) to a neutral, unsaturated color (center of the scope).

I also check flesh tones to see if they fall on the so-called flesh tone line (highlighted in the second figure on this page). After fixing the color cast in the clip of the family seated around the table, the flesh tones ended up being only a few degrees off the flesh tone line (shown below). So instead of using the Balance Magnitude control, I rotated the Hue Angle, the outer wheel, counterclockwise a few degrees to rotate the flesh tone to the line.

Using the Crop effect to isolate flesh tone showed values just a few degrees away from the Vectorscope flesh tone line. Simply rotating the color wheel Hue Angle toward the flesh tone line, corrected that issue.

Taking color correction further - secondary color correction

Fixing tonality and color within the entire clip frame might be all you need to do. But sometimes you want to adjust tonality on areas within the frame of the clip, so-called secondary color correction. Secondary color correction is a topic for a much longer tutorial. To get a sense for how that works, take a look at the bottom of the RGB Color Corrector, RGB Curves, or the Three-way Color Corrector effect. Each offers Secondary Color Correction controls that let you select regions in a clip based on hue, saturation and luma. Once selected you can limit your tonality and color correction work to only those regions.

In addition, the RGB Color Corrector and the Three-way Color Corrector let you define the tonal range. That is, instead of letting those effects automatically determine which areas are considered shadows, midtones and highlights, you can make that judgment call. In that way, you can fine tune your tonality and color adjustments.

No matter how carefully you adjust the tonality definition and secondary color correction controls, some parts of the clip you don’t want to change might end up being in the selected regions. In those cases, you can use a graphic coupled with the Track Matte Key video effect to further isolate the regions you want to fix. I explain how to do that and other secondary color correction methods in my lynda.com tutorial: “Premiere Pro: Color Correction and Enhancement.”

Whether you choose to use secondary color correction tools, it’s always a good idea to make primary color correction - tonality and color cast adjustments - a regular part of your video editing workflow.

Jeff Sengstack is a lynda.com author. His latest tutorial series, “Premiere Pro: Color Correction and Enhancement,” is scheduled for release in September, 2011. He has worked with Adobe Systems in the past, but currently does not receive any compensation with Adobe.

(Page 3 of 3 pages for this article  <  1 2 3)

                   

 

10 Final Cut Pro things FCP editors might be missing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Scott Simmons | 05/11 These are a few of the things that I found myself searching for as I’ve been moving over to Premiere Pro CS6 as a FCP 7 replacement Adobe is making a big play for Final Cut Pro users with their CS6 release of Premiere Pro. It’s vastly improved over the Premiere Pro of old and is a lot like Final…

Color Correction Practice Game Steve Hullfish | 05/05 Test your skills, improve your eye I found a very cool little site that tests your ability to match a specific color based on hue, saturation and brightness. At first, I thought it was just kind of cute,…

Random notes from my first “real world” Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 edit Scott Simmons | 04/30 The new Premiere continues to impress. I was fortunate to get my hands on an early release of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and an edit that came up last week…

---

You must be registered to comment. This is an effort to reduce spam. Please REGISTER HERE.

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: