Color Grading in 5 Easy Steps (NO LUTS!) - Premiere Pro Tutorial

What is the difference between color grading and color correction?

Color grading is the process of editing film or video footage to have a new look to help make a video feel more vibrant and stylistic. Color correcting is the process of editing film or video footage to fix any imbalances in the color so it can appear how the eye is meant to see it.

We are going to color grade to get a stylized teal & orange look

Clip is on the timeline

Open up color workspace

Start in basic correction

Some people like to make an adjustment layer and apply their color grading to that. I don’t like to do that. Because one of the 1st steps I take when I’m setting up a new project is to address color, I can do that to the entire clip before I start cutting it up. Now if you are working on a much bigger project, doing color first may really bog down your computer. I still don’t like to use an adjustment layer - I like to make changes at the clip level. It’s just my preferred workflow.

So since this video is about color grading and not color correction, I’ll just click on the auto button here under basic correction. (Let me know if you’d like to see a video on color correction and how to read the vector scopes!)

Now open up the curves tab

RGB curves

The white circle is also known as the master curve and it controls the overall brightness of your video

So each colored circle gives you the opportunity to control the brightness of each of those colors

The white circle will control the brightness of all of those colors equally

Low on the line represent the shadows in the image, the middle of the line is the midtones, and the upper end of the line represents the highlights

I’ll start with making a subtle S curve on the master curve

This just gives the image a little bit more contrast

Hue vs Saturation curve

This will allow you to select colors and make them pop more than others

All of your colors, or hues, are on this color spectrum here, the x axis.

The saturation value is on the y axis

So if you make 2 points on the line, then drag the 3rd dot up, you will add more saturation to your image. And the reverse is true as well, if you drag that point down you will desaturate that color.

Now maybe you want to pick a specific color in the image, use the eyedropper tool to select it in the program monitor. You can see that the dots are created for you on the color line.

So for this look I want to desaturate the greens just a bit, so I will drag that down.

HSL secondary tab

This really does a great job of isolating a specific color

I’m going to use this to make all the colors pop, except my skintone. 

To start I’m going to isolate the skin tone and then invert that selection.

Use the 1st eyedropper to select my skintone, then click on the color/grey box

Now you can see everything in the image that is that color. If the eyedropper didn’t pick up the entire face, use the 2nd eyedropper to add more of that color

Now use the HSL lines to really perfectly isolate that color

Once you’ve gotten it where you want it, we are going to adjust the denoise (30) and blur (8) so that color isolation isn’t as harsh

Now I’m going to click the box beside color/grey and it will invert my selection. Now you can see that everything except the color of my skin is selected.

You can uncheck the color/grey to see the entire image in the program monitor, but don’t worry, the colors you are looking to change are still selected.

Now go down to correction and move the center point down in between the blue and the light blue.

Now open up color wheels and lower the midtones just a touch

Now let’s add a really subtle vignette.

This is an easy way to draw attention to the subject, but be careful not to go overboard with it, it can go hokey fast.

Lower amount & increase feather

If you want to add black bars to the top and bottom of your video, you can either change the aspect ratio to 21:9 or just crop the top and bottom