Selective color adjustments using HSL in Premiere Pro

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at this, the HSL Secondary. It's not a very exciting name, but it does have some amazing features. We're going to use it to change color; watch her coat, blue, and then this color, very similar to the technique we did earlier on using the curves, but this one has a lot more control. 

We're also going to introduce a couple of ways of using more than one of these Lumetri Color. Corrections, so in this one here, we have separated the sky from the ocean, let me show you. I have gone 'Ocean Adjustment', you see it changing there, and I've got one, that's a 'Sky Adjustment', it's more than one Lumetri, affecting different parts of the images. 

We're going to be using this HSL Secondary twice, once on the sky, once in the water. We're also going to be introducing masks, so that we can separate some of the similarities between the sky and the ocean. It's a little bit long, this one, but there's a few things to introduce. I promise it's going to be worth it. So that before we get started, is that, I was having problems with Premiere Pro, mainly with Lumetri color, and not being able to see those little dots I was making. So I restarted Premiere Pro, kind of fixed it, what's fixed it permanently is under 'Help'. I went to 'Updates', there was an update for Premiere Pro, I run the update, took about 10 minutes, and we're back, and it seems to be working perfect. 

So anyway, first thing we need to do is bring in some media. So the files that I want are Color Correction D, E, and F, bring them into a project, and we'll start with D. So let's make a new sequence from it. I was messing around with mine, I'm going to go 'Fit', so changing this color is going to be easy, there's a nice distinctive color change here, and the reason we like HSL, it's going to do a very similar job to when we went to Curves, and this Hue Saturation, remember, we went, blue, blue, and adjustments, clearly the wrong one. That's Hue versus Saturation, let's turn that off. 

So let's go blue, blue, and try to move that, and Saturation. So that works, but we have very little control. We can play around with this, but it is a little bit of, like, hope for the best. So I'm going to turn Curves off, that's where HSL shine, a bit more control, a lot more control. So it's all down to selection, Key, Refine - let's twirl these up. - these first two chunks actually have quite a bit of things in them, all they do is make a selection, and then you make the correction down here. So let's look at a real simple use case. 

So let's grab the Eyedropper tool, and say, I want the blues to change, under 'Correction' I want to drag it from blue to red, and it kind of worked. I could have made it kind of a pink color. Let's have a look, it is working, remember, hold 'Shift' if you want to go faster. You can kind of see, I'm changing the colors in there, so that's a quick way. I didn't-- sometimes you can get away with that, but let's reset it. So to reset it, double click it anywhere, and it goes back to normal, let's close it down, and let's look at this part in more detail. So I'm going to reset it again. 

What you can do is you can manually pick the color, or use these little dots up here. So you use the Eyedropper tool to pick the blue, or you use these and say, I want to adjust the blues, which is probably where I'm going to start in this one, or you can drag the middle, not the top, not the bottom, the middle part, and decide where you want it to be, say in the blues. So let's do this option, blue, because what it does is it picks the blues, can you see, that's where the center of it is, but it also gives you some range, it says, like blues, but a little bit this way, and a little bit that way, not just perfectly kind of like a royal blue, but a little either side of the blue. 

How do you adjust that? Use that top slider, this top slider says blue plus all the greens, plus all the yellows, like you can grab lots of it. So you can decide. Now what you'll notice, while you're dragging this top one, can you notice that the Program window changed here, and it went kind of a gray color. It's to do with this down here, you see, this toggles on when I start dragging it. What we might do for this one is just turn it. You don't normally smile, up to you. 

I'm going to turn mine on for the whole time, just so that I can adjust it, and have a look, so I can see that it's grabbing all the blue in here. You'll notice that there's some blue in her eyes, but I'm going to ignore that for the moment. I'll show you how to mask that out later on. So this gives us just a bit more control, it allows us to pick the blue, but also because the Eyedropper gets pretty narrow, look how wide of scope we've got here, if I use the Eyedropper tool. So I'm going to reset it, we'll reset it and use the Eyedropper tool, and I'm going to turn that off. So turn that off, reset it, use my Eyedropper tool, and pick this, the kind of blue that it's picked is pretty narrow, and if I turn that on, it's only going to select that, but that's why that initial selection was kind of changing it, but kind of not. 

So what we're going to say is, actually I want blues not just here, but, remember, this top slider, expand the scope, you're like, "It's not working." Can you see, the center line here is kind of more in the green part. So I could say, actually I want the blues, but over here. You can kind of drag them back and forth to find where the sweet spot is, you're like, cool, I've got that, what's this, why do I still not have this edge stuff? 

So it's got a very narrow search on, the Saturation and the Luminance, can you see down the bottom here, there's a gray and a really strong blue, and down here I've got black and white. So what we're saying is, I only want to select the blue in this kind of narrow saturation range. What I can do is, grabbing the top one, we're ignoring the bottom one for the moment on purpose, what I'm saying is, actually grab more of the saturation, grab loads of it, can you see, the eyes aren't included yet. If I grab it all, still no eyes, that's cool. 

So we're getting there, perfect, we've got lots of it back and forth, that seems to grab most of it, and then the lightness, so there's bits in here that are just, can you see, it's only selecting the stuff that is quite dark blue, but let's say we want to grab the light stuff, that's kind of up in here. So grab the top slider again, expand it out, expand it out, expand it out. So those are what they do, you pick the right color, and then you want to select the kind of right saturation and the right luminance, and use these top sliders to kind of expand it out. Use the middle one to kind of get it in the right zone, and you're looking just underneath it. So we're going to grab all of that, and then you expand out the range, to kind of go a little bit left, a little bit right, of where I've got my selection. 

So what do these little sliders down the bottom do? They just expand, they've got like a bit of a, this top one is everything in here, and then this little, there's like a taper like, kind of this stuff, this is like the fuzzing of the edge. You can say, kind of this stuff, you can grab it out to say, I want to grab all of this blue, but then some green, a little bit of, when we get into yellow. So this is kind of like a way of just easing the edges of your selection, so it kind of picks everything into there, and then kind of eases down to there. 

You can have it right there, to have a very narrow selection, only pick these colors forever, or just a little bit of easing. Same down here for Saturation and Luminance. So you can see, I want all of this, plus there's a bit of a kind of a gray area, or a little bit of like expandy fuzziness, man, is it hard to understand, I don't know. I'm not sure how good a job I'm doing here, we're going to do a couple of examples to kind of get it right. 

Now other things you can change is, well, let's do a correction now, down here you can use this little slider, you can say, "All right, I want to change this," move it around, remember, holding 'Shift' to do it in a nice big go, and we can change those colors pretty easily. You might decide that you don't like this little guy, you can use these instead. It's a way of doing the same thing, temperature, left and right, you can change it to be red, less blue, you can make it more magenta, you can play around with these sliders instead of this, or an adjustment too. You can also--

Now you've done this selection, it's not just Hue, we can play around with things like the contrast, how contrasting is that blue, how sharp is it, how saturated it is, is it gray or is it like super saturated? Also, if you do decide, like this Color Wheel is for you, but it's too generic, it's doing all the colors too much. You can break it down into, like mid tones, shadows, and highlights. Ours doesn't have a whole lot, they're all very similar tones, so it's not a huge change, but you can change the shadows to pink, and the highlights to yellow. We don't have many highlights, and not many shadows either. It's basically on the mid tones, but know that you can break it down if you have that kind of selection. 

All right, she has no head, and remember, we can reset it all by double clicking anywhere, go into this one as well, double click this one, double click that one. So I'm going to change it all to pink, let's go. and let's turn our head back on, by having that on, you can adjust this, if you don't like that gray slider, you can change it to be a bit more contrast, like color against the black, or just black and white, if you prefer working that way. It's really kind of common way of working especially from, like Photoshop style kind of masking work, up to you. That looks pretty cool, but she has no head. 

So we're going to get into a bit more detail here. Let's open up another file, let's do it with E, so 'Color Correction E', let's make a new sequence from it, and this one here, this is a really good use case that I use, and it's going to introduce some more advanced effects, that you're going to-- we're going to have to deal with masking and duplicate effects on the same image, or at least the same video. So with my clip selected what I'm going to do is, I'm going to pick the blues, and it's gone through and picked blues. 

How do I know if it's right? Let's just turn that on, and let's maybe use color versus black, just have a nice good contrast. So this is great, I can now go and say, I want the sky to be-- I'm holding 'Shift', remember, drag it out fast, and go, I want it to be pink, and that's not what I want, but you can see, it's made a great selection, but it's also done the sea, that's not what I want, because what I want to do is make the sky more saturated. 

So under here, under 'Correction', I just want to make it more saturated, but it's also messing with my ocean, that's not what I want. So this is where Hue is right, but my, either one of these two, is going to help me identify the separation, and in this case it's luminance, because this is very dark and this is very light, light, luminance, so what I want to do is scale this down. 

So remember, you start with the top one, scale it down to something a little bit more narrow, then you kind of move those white one in and out to say, can you see? So there, looking underneath it, so we want some of this light stuff, with a kind of a broader scope, until we start getting into the ocean. If we go too far it starts getting all the ocean as well, it's not what I want, one kind of just the sky there, and then do you want this to kind of tail out? Do you want that kind of easing into the darker stuff down here, or do you want to keep it nice and tight? In my case I probably want it nice and tight, let's make it even smaller maybe, and drag it a little bit further this way, there you go. 

So we've got all our sky selected, now it might be a bit of both, it might be a bit of saturation as well, you might find a great selection out of it, but in this case it's mainly the light and darkness of the two, that are a really good differentiation for us. Now I can go in here and say, actually I want the blues to be, in our case, just a smudgy bit more blue, and I want them to be a smudgy bit more saturated. You can play with temperature and tint, like we did earlier on, but that's good for me. I'm going to turn this off, and let's turn the effects for Lumetri, on and off. 

Can you see, I just grabbed the sky now, I made that change. So let's say now we want to do the sea, this brings us to a good point about duplicating effects, because I can now go make a selection for the sea, and adjust my Hue and Saturation. So Hue Saturation Luminance to get a good selection, but I can't hold on to the sky. If I make a change now it's going to change, if I go now and say, actually I want to find the ocean, it has lost the sky, the sky's gone. So I'm going to undo that, so what you end up doing - undo it twice. - is see over here, in my Effect controls, I've got Lumetri color applied to this, and at the moment all it's doing is, under these HSL sliders, it's doing all of this. 

There is all my little sliders, they match, doesn't really matter if you drag them over here or over here, but it's working on that and it's only working on my sky, turn it off, turn it on. So what I want to do is make a new one. I can either duplicate it over here, so I get two of them, or I can apply another Lumetri effect. 

You can do it a couple of ways, you can find Lumetri effects in the Effects panel, you can type in "Lumetri color", and you can drag another one on. So we've got another one on this clip, or you can--I'm going to undo that, see these two. So I'm going to undo that, or you can go to the top of the sliders here, and you can see, where it says Effects, Lumetri color, I can add another Lumetri color, up to you which one you remember later on. 

This top one here is the one we did for the sky. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to say you, rename it, and you're going to say sky adjustment, and it kind of renames it, still called Lumetri color, but at least now we know what that is doing. Let's do the same for this. Let's say, that's going to be so for the ocean adjustment. So with it selected, got this clip selected, I want to go in here and say, let's grab the blues, but let's use the luminance that is, let's move it down, and move this around until, instead of the sky selected, let's just move it, so the ocean is selected, we're kind of in there. 

Let's expand it out a little bit, until before the sky comes in, that seems all right. I'm going to turn this on, switch it to black, it seems about right. It's missing a little bit in there, unfortunately it's very close to the sky, a little sky reflections, probably. So let's have a little look at the luminance. Yeah, it's grabbing that one, move it up a tiny bit, and I'll show you how to, actually, let's leave it down, and I'll show you how to do a mask when we're finished. 

So we've got this now. I'm going to go down to my correction, and what I want to do is kind of make it a little bit more oceany green, from kind of like New Zealand ocean green, ends up being this like cool turquoise color, here we go. Maybe you want to play around with the, remember the slider on here, what does this slider do? It's the same on all the sliders, it deals with luminance, make it brighter or darker. So in this case I'll just make it a little bit brighter, here we go. How's it looking? We're missing that tiny bit of puddle here, but I'll show you-- get rid of that in a minute. Let's turn it on and off. 

So that's our goal there, we're able to adjust the sky, make another Lumetri, completely separate, give it a name and then do another adjustment. How was that? Are you anymore understanding these things? It took me a while to get the hang of them. The key or the word here, key, is another word for mask, think key, mask, mask, key. So this is what you're masking, and you have-- you can control it by what color it is, how saturated that color is, and how bright it is, using the luminance. 

I probably should have done that at the beginning. You can use this to kind of just mask it, so you can actually see what it's doing, and the one thing we didn't do, is Refine. Refine is-- I'm going to turn this on, let's zoom in a little bit, it'll just help with the edges. So I'm going to go in, super zoom, 400. Can you see here, on the edges, if I adjust Denoise, back and forth, it denoises it, less noisy edge. Blur is probably the most significant one, watch this, if I blur, it loads, it's going to do that, but I find just a little bit of blurring, just a little bit, will give you a nice transition between the blue and the background. So it's not so, like harsh. 

The next thing to cover-- Auto save, the next thing to cover is, how to adjust them separately afterwards, because, watch this, if I click on Ocean Adjustment, so it's got the green that I made, but if I go on Sky, nothing changes, how do I get to these guys? So you do it at the top here of your Lumetri Color panel, right at the top here, you see, where it says this, you've got Sky Replacement and Ocean Replacement. So depending on which, I can jump back to sky, you can see, everything adjusted for the sky, and I can make my changes. I also mentioned earlier, that I'd fixed the blue water in here, and if you click on this, and you are watching, you notice they're like, hey, what about this stuff? I don't want that to be like the turquoise green. 

So we're going to do masks throughout this course, probably more properly later on, so if it's a little bit quick and dirty at this stage, don't worry, we're going to continue it more later on, but basically what we want to do is, we want to have our clip selected, and we want to find the Lumetri color that we want to work with, you might only have one, so it's easy. In our case I want to work on the ocean one, because that's the one giving me these problems along here. 

I want to add a mask just so that I only work on this bit, not the person, not these trees, because they are separate, I can try and work with the Saturation Illuminance to try and adjust it, remember, we can play around with this, sometimes you just can't. So what I want to do is twirl this down over here, I'm in my Effect controls, I want to-- this thing here is a mask, I'm going to use this four point Polygon mask, it's a rectangle, and I've masked this part off, and what I want to do is, maybe turn off black versus white, because it's a bit funny looking, and what I want to do is, I'm going to grab all the different points. 

So I'm going to grab this top one, and put it just off screen, same with this bottom one, I put it just off screen, can you see, what it's doing, it's masking, it's adjusting my Lumetri to only be within the inside of it. So I can say, I just want you, yeah, about like that, misses him out, misses that top bit out. Let's turn that black and white back on, you can see, it's not doing anything over there anymore. You can invert it, let's say that you've-- you want everything, but what you've selected, you can invert the mask here, so it's, let's turn that on, can you see, it's actually applying it to up here. 

So let's do the invert; invert, invert, if you are-- if your mind's going numb from like, "Holy smoke, did we just learn HSL Secondary and masks in the same thing?" Forget the masks, we'll do them later on, what we're doing is the Lumetri color, and we're using this Hue Saturation Luminance, Secondary Color Selection, because it's really good using these three sliders to make really good masks. You can check your masks by turning this on to either gray, black and white, or color black. You make your adjustments down here, and if you need to you can make some refinements. If you need to get rid of that mask, because it's gone crazy and you're like, "Oh, it was too much for me", click on 'Mask', and just hit 'Del' on your keyboard, and it's gone. I'm going to put mine back. 

All right, one last thing to show you, we worked on this one here, where we made a mask, let's turn it on, around this, but let's say you're doing multiple clips. So you spent ages getting this working, so we're going to go back to our Project, I've got another one, Color Correction. I'm going to drag this on, but she's still blue, look at that, still blue. What we can do is we can hover above this one, make sure it's selected, grab this, just go 'Copy' on your keyboard, the shortcut, or long way, 'Edit', 'Copy', and we can click on this one and say, 'Edit', 'Paste', see what it did there. It pasted, Lumetri color came along for the ride, and because it's in a similar setting, similar colors, similar lighting, similar camera, we've used the exact same settings, and we can apply it to a new clip. That works just as well when we've got this, you can select it and copy it on to different shots, as long as there are similar sort of exposure, and light, and daylight, that sort of stuff. So it's another handy trick. 

All right, that was a long one, I didn't think this HSL Secondary was going to be such a long video, but I guess, to do it properly we had to learn about Masks and multiple Lumetri color effects, so there you go. Let's get into the next one, and I will make it shorter, I promise. Actually, you've earned a break, go have a cup of tea, and I will see you in the next video.