Ok, I’ve been teaching use of Lumetri sincd they most unfortunately ended SpeedGrade a decade back now. Including (paid) for professional colorists needing to do something in Premiere. So I’m rather familiar with both apps, and as I use a Tangent Elements full panel, it’s much nicer to be in Pr than R for color work in general.
One opening comment … when would you not use scopes? I have them visible all the time in Lumetri, as in Resolve’s Color Page. At times even having external scopes on.
Also, at this time, Lumetri is on the way out. Check out the new Color Mode … sort of like a page … in the public beta. Noted colorist/author/teacher Alexis Van Hurkman came up with that entire concept himself, and it is a very different, totally new conceptual approach from any current grading system, Resolve, Baselight, whatever. And is both rather powerful and intriguiging though not yet ‘finished’ as several major tools have yet to be added to it. Such as multiple LUT application locations, better inverse transforms, a “library” system for storing/compiling/sharing grades and grade bits … and full panel support. ALL are in process, hoping to get them soon.
Lumetri In Use
Resolve and Lumetri are completely different approaches to working color, and though some things are analagous, many aren’t actually the same thing. So learning what things actually do in Premiere’s Lumetri has been as needed as learning what things actually do in Resolve’s color tools has always been.
Basic tab tools display the “guided” behavior prominent in most of Lumetri’s tools … say the Exposure tool. Raising it is mostly like using the Gamma wheel tonality slider in Resolve … until the top values approach 100 percent, as rather than simply pushing those values higher, it rolls off changing values to somewhere about 99.5->100, and does not lift anything past 100. Similar happens in the Highlights and Shadows controls.
But the Blacks control is different, it’s kinda like a swinging door with the hinge somewhere around 20%. Doesn’t affect anything above that, and can definitely crush values when pushed down.
There is a problem with LUT application in the Basic tab … note it’s at the top? This is all very graphically represented as the app applies it… apply a normalization LUT in the Basic tab and it is applied before any work in that tabe is applied.
This is of course backwards from normalization LUT use in Resolve. Where … you apply a LUT to a node, then do any work in that same node, and the operations you do are all applied before the LUT so you can use them to ‘trim’ the clip to fit what the LUT needs.
So in Lumetri, when using normalization LUTs, I always teach and personally use applying them in the second tab’s LUT slot … the Creative tab’s “Look” slot. THEN do my normalization trim work in the Basic tab after setting the normalization LUT in the Creative tab.
Note, you can do “white balance” in the Basic tab … and saturation … and!!!! … you can use the Shadow and Highlight “tint” wheels in the Creative tab to do your color balance operations also, and as you have a slider to set where they blend together, it’s a far better place to do white/color balance work as you can handle both ‘general’ color balance of the mids and highlights while separately correcting shadow color balance.
And Sat in Creative is accompanied by the Vibrance control …
Curves is pretty ‘normal’. As is Color Wheels and Secondary operation therein.
One thing to note … is the difference between clip operations, and Source operations. If you use an effect on a bit of a clip in the timeline, it only effects that bit of that clip. BUT … if you then drag that effect to the original clip in the bin, it applies that effect to all bits of that clip anywhere and everywhere in the entire project. Very useful to use Source effects to do bulk prepwork to reduce shotmatching later on.
General Operating Practices
So basics of general operation … you can use mulitple instances of Lumetri “stacked” on a clip. This is very useful to sort out the type and order of operations of the tools. The top of the Lumetri panel has a place for you to create new instances, name, and of course, select which you are wanting to work with now.
You can also use Adjustment Layers to put the same Lumetri controls over a set of clips on a timeline, or the whole thing. That’s where show “looks” are often put.
You can copy and paste entire instances of Lumetri from one clip to another but you cannot copy/paste only parts of an instance. (Thankfully that is not a limitation in the new Color Mode!)
You can use the Secondary controls in Lumetri in ‘typical’ Secondary operation, but only in the controls in that secondary section. You can’t ‘copy’ or reuse a set of Secondary qualifiers … except … if you use stacke layers of the same clip and the Track Matte effect.
Using the Track Matte …
- you click/drag a clip up a track and let go, do again, so you have the same clip on three adjacent tracks. Go to the second (middle) clip, and apply the Track Matte effect to that clip. Go to the Effects Control panel to set that effects settings, choose Luminance … and the track number above it.
- Go to the upper clip, the Secondary part of Lumetri, and make your selection, setting the mask to the black/white option and leaving the mask active!
- Go back to the middle track, and apply Lumetri below the Track Matte effect in the contols. Now what you will work on with any tool of Lumetri is only the image data shown as visible in the top track mask.
I used that one time, with four sets of tracks of a single clip, to show some of my colorist buds that you can do things in Lumetri they were adamant that you couldn’t. Ha! Showed them. (Was it a bit of a pain to set up? Yup. But it worked.
Shotmatching … first, you will need to have the Program monitor in Comparison view. And ... well, it’s best if you have already grouped clips by what camera/scene/settings were used on them, so you can select entire groups of clips to be ‘active’ and paste a Lumetri instance or even a stack of instances on the rest of the clips. Thus giving all similar clips the same starting point before attempting shotmatching. I often pick one clip from each group to make a basic grading sequence. After that sequence looks mostly ready, I copy the Lumetri from each clip back to it’s group of clips.
You can use the auto-process in the Color Wheels tab to match to a selected reference from from elsewhere on that same sequence.
Personally …. I really am ready to move on to the Color Mode and drop Lumetri. Said as someone who has pushed Lumetri about as far as anyone, and also was one of the first invited into the private beta group of the new color page. Which I thought was a nightmarish hot doo-doo- mess on first sight, but after 1) they gave far more tools and made some changes we in the group wanted and 2) I finally “grokked” the way you need to mentally approach working in it … I found to be a most amazing, powerful, and welcome change to grading.
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