Introduction to advanced color correction & grading in Premiere Pro

All right, I'm back, live in action, just to check you're still awake. This next section is all about color. I put this little intro in here, because color is quite broad in terms of-- we're going to look at-- we did a bit of color correction, in the Essentials course, but we're going to go a lot more advanced now. We're also going to look at some color grading, and for me, kind of like a sub group of all of that, and super important is, kind of consistency of color across different clips, which is probably some of the hardest things to do. 

So yeah, it's a long one, there's a lot to cover, and when I say long one, I don't mean, like long and boring, I mean long and interesting. It just means that there's a lot of different ways to approach the same thing. We're doing the same thing, we want a certain look, both correct, and have a certain kind of visual appeal, but there's lots of ways of approaching it, and I guess I want to show you a bunch of different ways, not every single way, but all of the big ones that you'll find, because people get a little bit-- if you look online there's a lot of people defending ways of doing stuff, "You must color grade this way", or, "You must fix skin tones this way." 

I'm going to show you a couple of different ways of approaching the same thing, and it will be right, one of them will be right for you, circle that one, go, "That one's awesome, that suits my needs greatly," but it's really interesting to figure, see what all the different ways of approaching it is, because you might find that the job you're working on now, it's going to be, the technique will be different for the next job, there's things like budget, both the, how much money is in the project, and your time budget, and what you're allowed to do. 

Also, things like, are you the videographer, are you shooting it, or are you able to influence the shoot, which is going to make a big difference to what you get, and start editing. Also, are you dealing with stock video, and where is it going, is it going to feature linked film, or is it going to a YouTube, sorry, Instagram story. They are going to decide a lot on, like what techniques you want to do, have time to do, can be bothered doing. So yeah, I'm going to run through all the great ones here. 

The other thing to cover quickly, before we get started, is proxies. Proxies are super helpful, when you're trying to do your edits, but when you come to things like color correction, and grading, and contrast, it's best to either turn them off, if your machine can handle it, because you want great pixels there, to be adjusting, you don't have to, if you--

Many people still, professionals grade with proxies, because they have to. You've just got to make sure you're using the right kind of proxy. So if you are very interested in correct color and matching scenes, it's probably best to use a proxy, that is something like the ProRes 2, sorry 422, or maybe the Go Pro Cineform, that's a nice one that works across different Mac and PC, those are great ones that won't degrade the color and the depth of color too much. So make sure proxy's either turned off, or you're using a proxy, like I mentioned before. 

All right, let's get started. Are you wondering what happened there, where is it, yep, banged into a shelf, that's what happened there. All right, let's get color grading.