Color Grading in Premiere Pro Without Magic Bullet

[crowboy]

My company and I (Evil Genius Entertainment) just finished production on our latest digital feature "The 6th Extinction" so we're gearing up for supplemental production and marketing. I thought I would share this tutorial I wrote about color grading your film if you don't have Magic Bullet.

More tutorials to come.

http://www.crowboy.com/evilgenius/videoarticle_premiere.html

 

[Will Vincent]

I like the before and after screenshots, but there's not really enough "how-to" to really call this a tutorial. Basically all you're providing is the information that premiere has a 3-way color correction tool built in, and then showing a number of before and after shots of the images.

There's nothing wrong with that, but if it's to be a tutorial I think you need to provide more information about what changing each setting does to the image.

Obviously your main point is that you can accomplish most of what can be done with higher end color grading tools (specifically Colorista and Magic Bullet) without using those tools, and that's a good point to make for people who are unaware.

Premiere, Vegas, and Final Cut all have similar 3-way color correction tools available.. using those you can achieve much of the same results as if you were using a higher end color correction tool.

Here's more of what I would consider a tutorial... While focused around Magic Bullet and Colorista, the Red Giant TV Episode #22 covers the techniques involved, and those techniques can be applied to the tools built into your NLE.

 

[crowboy]

Consider it an FYI article. I could post all of my settings, however every shot had it's own needs as would those of someone's film.

My basic steps would be to add the Three-Way Color Corrector: pushing the shadows towards green-blue, midtones towards the orange, and keep highlights neutral. For a sunny day shot I would move the highlights to the yellow/orange. But really any one making a film can change the color to whatever they want.

Then I crush the blacks with Levels to around 5-15 (depending on the shot) and move the whites and midtones around until it looks nice and balanced.