Lumetri Scope - RGB Parade to fix temperature in Premiere Pro

Oh yes, it is time for a Parade. You saw it in the title, you see it here, this is The Parade. It's not as exciting as an actual parade, but it's exciting enough. Red, Green, and Blue Parade, we're going to use it for color balancing, watch this. You probably can't see it, we're going to do something a bit more extreme, well, way more extreme, so before, turn it on, Dan, after. Look at that, all with the help of this Lumetri Scope, called The Parade. 

All right, first up, let's bring in two files, this one's called Color Correction G, stick it on the same Timeline as Color Correction M. We'll start with something quite subtle, and then something that's got a huge Color Cast. Let's start over here, and let's turn on our RGB Parade. It's just called the Parade, it's that one there, turn it on, and what we're going to do is, actually I want to, before you do the kind of color balancing, you need to really work with the waveform, and get the tonal range right. So up to you whether you want them all on, or just one, but let's work on this first. Let's get our Luma right first, and then we'll do the, start working with the Parade, and looking at the kind of tonal range, sorry, the white balance or color balance, whatever you want to call it. 

All right, so the blacks are kind of tidy there, the whites. It's a mixture of looking at this slider, well, not looking at the slider, picking the right one, keeping an eye on this, and one eye on this, shadows. Really what this is good for is just knowing, if you're kind of pushing stuff into the kind of clipping areas or not. All right, that's enough, it's a little bit flat, but let's have a look at the colors. So this, the RGB Parade, we'll move this around. So let's get rid of these guys for the moment, and just have on the Parade. What we're looking for is these guys should be all in balance, to balance your images, means all three of these need to be in a similar sort of height here. 

So it's looking at this information, but broken into the kind of brightness, of the red channel versus the green channel, versus the blue channel, whereas this is everything together. What we want to do is try and balance them. So pick a couple of lines and look for some significant goop or trace that you can balance. You can see this, but here's pretty good, it's there at 80 ire, which doesn't mean anything, international radio engineers numbers that they picked, but at 80 ire you can see, red's a lot higher than all the rest of them. So that's instantly a kind of a-- there's a subtle Hue change, it's more red than any of the other ones, mainly it's going to be more red than blue. 

So what we want to do now, is go into my Basic Correction and the white balance, the temperature here is going to make the big shifts, so just wiggle one and see what happens over here, the dance goes and you're trying to get them all kind of, I'm trying to get that dot kind of, following that ire line, and that's kind of looking right, and you'll find, you'll kind of fix this one, and then there'll be a little bit of this, and then a little bit of that. I find that maybe, maybe just a little bit more up this way, I'm not even looking at the image at the moment, mainly because I'm trying to show you the waveform here. 

It's really hard with real subtle color casts, and you're like, "Oh, is there a change, is there not?" So let's turn it on and off, can you sense the-- what we might do is, I'm going to reset my color balance, just so we can see the difference. So it's going to look a bit uglier, but I reset this so that I can just turn this on and off, and it's only doing the temperature now, can you see, by the video, would you say is better? The Parade says it's better, and I think it looks better, but hey, so that's what the Parade's use for it. 

So use it for balancing out colors, pick some significant areas, and try and get them to match, using something like the temperature and tint sliders. You might be asking, "Why don't you just use Eyedropper tool?" So let's clear it all, if you remember, weirdly, remember, if you reset this, and down the bottom, it doesn't reset that, so you got to kind of like double click them to get rid of them, and let's just use the Eyedropper tool, and pick a white part, this is the trouble, he's like, "Which white part, did that do it?" Pretty subtle. 

So it's not like an official white, like some of those color cards or clapboards, so you can get away with getting close with this, and you might end up clicking on something that's like, that there, I know it's not white in real life, maybe it looks like in here, it's got kind of a marshmallow color. So that's when you need to start kind of playing with the sliders, and this here is to just assist you in that, and also know that this is one of the ways that you can get consistency across a couple of clips. 

So you can kind of jump from clip to clip, and just kind of see where this all lines up, and if there's, something's a little off, but works for you, in terms of maybe your grade, you can keep that consistent, across the other one, like kind of drop the blue a little bit, if you're trying to add effects. At the moment we're trying to balance an image so it looks normal. I'm doing the air quotes again, but let's do this one, this is a bit tougher, it's my garage, it was some B-roll, and it's here, because, well it's this crazy color because I didn't set my white balance, I was just rushing through, so it is set to kind of like cloudy day inside a room, and it ends up bright yellow. 

So let's have a look at our RGB Parade, first thing though is, remember, we need to bounce it out, so this is-- you'll end up with more than one of these up, often, whichever ones you're relying on the most. So I rely on this one all the time, so we're going to have this up, so I can work on. I'll speed this up now because you've seen this a million times. 

So that's enough, let's turn off the waveform, I'd normally leave it on, but we'll turn it off for this tutorial, so that you can easily see the Parade. So you can see, there's no blue, there's loads of warmth and a chunk of green. So we need to balance that up, so grab our Temperature sliders, there's going to be a lot of this. So yeah, I totally ignored the shot, and I was just trying to balance this, so now I ended up with a good enough result. This one's harder because it's pretty extreme, and also, the blues have ended up doing some weird stuff, can you see the kind of really crazy over saturated, just, it was pretty an extreme example. 

I'll show you how I cleaned this up, now fix the blues a little bit, they're just, they're too much, actually, before we do that, I'll just show you, I'm going to reset these by double clicking them, and the Eyedropper tool works well in this one. We use these by dragging and sliding, and using these, because the Eyedropper tool is very automatic, and sometimes you're like, it gets it wrong, in this case it does pretty well, because I know that's white, these little Ikea drawers here, and it basically got to where I was at. 

So yeah, I'd shortcut and jump to that, in this particular case, but there's so many times where there's nothing, there's something in there that's not white, or it's grubby, or it's off-white, or the kind of refrigerator whites is, there's about a billion different whites, in the paint chart. So what we're going to do is-- the other thing I'd like to mention is, it doesn't often work if you're looking at, like specular highlights, or like, say bright lights, and you click it, see there, that's the automatic setting for using the light in there, and you're like, there's just often weird stuff going on inside of a bulb, it's not putting out pure white, this thing here in real life is, it's a fluorescent bulb so it gives off kind of a weird blue color, so that the rest of it goes, well, that's-- it was meant to be pure white but there's lots of blue, I'll add lots of yellow, and you're like, hmm, that didn't work. 

So LEDs are okay, they're quite neutral, depending on the LEDs that you're clicking on with Eyedropper tool, but fluorescent bulbs are blue, tungsten, kind of more old-school, light bulbs are yellow so you end up with a blue tinge, so look for something that's actually white, but you'll find that it doesn't work on everything, like, let's go for that one, I know that's white, yeah, got it pretty good, you can see in here, you might be just using this up to confirm, that yep, that's pretty spot-on except for the blues. The blues are tapping out here, they're like way too saturated. 

So let me show you how to fix up unique kind of colors, if they do get distorted like this. So we're going to use Curves, you could use the RGB Curves, and switch to the blue channel instead of the white. That's one way of doing it if you're more comfortable in there, we're going to use the kind of newer Hue Saturation Curves, and in this case we want the Hue versus Saturation, so not Hue versus Hue, don't want to change the blue, but we want to say, Eyedropper, grab the blue that's in that little ice cream pot there, and we're going to drag it up and down and decide where you want it, more saturated, no, less saturated, and then how low you want to go. 

I'm looking at the image, it's hard to know. That feels a bit right, and what we might do as well, is we've kind of-- we're lowering the saturation, but we also might lower the brightness. This is hard, like is this-- because I'm just like really looking at the blues now, so the Hue versus Luma, so Hue versus Brightness, same thing again, I'm going to find-- oh, what did I do? So I'm going to click that once, click on this, it's got the right one, and I'm going to lower this down, brightness, on, off, on, off. 

How do I feel about the blues? Oh, that's going to do-- like the problem in here is, this is like very unnatural, the lighting in here is strange, because it's inside, in a shed downstairs. So yeah, I feel like we've got a balance, let's turn it all on and all off using this fx at the top here, before, after, before, after, that makes me feel better. Sometimes you can spend ages just in the weeds, trying to fix things that maybe don't need to be fixed. Well, this is going to be very different, this is B-roll for a YouTube show, so not as important as kind of A-roll for a feature film, so you might not be as cavalier as often I can be with colors, that'll do. 

So we've learned what the Parade is, it's another way of kind of visualizing the color balance, in all honesty, I prefer the kind of longer method, using the Vector scopes, remember, we did this and we did a mask around a certain area that was white, and we tried to balance it, the trouble with that though, is you need something white in the image, or complete gray or complete black for that to work, whereas this here can work on all clips. 

The other thing while we're here, is organizing these. So often I'll have just-- you have all three of these on, let's say, let's say I've got that, that, and that, you're like, "Oh, I wish that was there, and that was there," and you're like, you can't drag them, so it's a trick of turning them on and off again, so if I-- the last one ends up at the bottom. So let's turn off the RGB Parade, and turn it back on, it'll end up down the bottom, the last one ends up here. So that's the trick. It's a bit clunky, but that's how it works. 

The other thing is, if you find it very hard to see all this trace, you will have to join the rest of us, when you're editing in a dark tank room. Your room doesn't have to be tank, but it can be, it has to be dark, like when I start these tutorials every morning, I, at the moment, or when I'm editing, I have to go through, pull all my blinds on my windows, it's a beautiful day today, here in Ireland, but I'm in the dark with you, editing. So I've had to like pull the curtains, and I've got a couple of lights on, so that it's not too gruesome in here, but you will find that you can't have lights reflecting on your screen when you're editing, especially when you're doing detail stuff like color balancing. 

So that's one thing to consider. Completely black is probably the easiest, because then you've got no influence of ambient light. I've got daylight lights in my office, I put them in special, so that they don't shine a specific color everywhere around, both, for recording and for editing. The other thing you might do though, is if you have to work in a, working in an office or somewhere where it's bright, and you can't deal with the dark, you can go into 'Preferences', go to 'Appearance', so remember, it's 'Edit', 'Preferences' on a PC, and here you can go to 'Appearance', and you can play around with this, and it does make it easier to work with. 

I've got mine down, when I'm working, I don't know, I have to reset my Preferences so often, that I forget to go and change this back up, but if I was only editing and not tutorialing, I'd have this up nice and bright, and same with interactive controls, that is, let me show you what those are. It's the anything that is blue, active controls, let's have a look, you can't see anything. It's the blue parts, there, that's going up, see that there, current time indicator, anything is blue, you can make brighter. So when you're in a dark room it's better to have it nice and low, so that you're not blinding your eyes, but when you're in a bright room, make it brighter, there you go, oh, just look at the sample color, whoops. All right, on to the next video.