Auto Color Correction

Perhaps you can elaborate your needs. auto color methods are really only useful for extremely fast changing color sources(flicker, timelapse, old film sources, etc) as manual control will usually always give better results as it will account for both perfect scopes and perceptual color and can be further refined with secondary correction. Anything 'auto' doesn't know what you want 100% of the time and can often makes things worse. In smaller cases, its actually faster to keyframe color changes from one shot to the next.   You can also try a XML to resolve's auto color which works a lot better. i also made an AE template for white balance, exposure flicker for extremly poor sources listed above.

A lot of editors do "white balance" first, then start with tonal corrections (darks to lights). Most colorists work tonal first, then do WB/color cast corrections. You can work either way.

I started doing WB first, then tonal. Now ... I typically apply a Lumetri effect preset that has Creative tab's Sat at 0, and use the tonal controls of Lumetri to get my black to white tones looking good. Then I go to the Creative tab, set Sat back to "normal", and check for color casts in both mid/highlights and shadows.

I do most of my color balancing using the Creative tab's Shadow and Highlights wheels rather than the "Color Balance" tool.

Why? Think of working with an RGB Curves tool/panel. What a Color Balance tool does is move the white points. As with any movement of a white point on a Curves panel, all other values down the line move proportionately to their place on that line white to black. So ... mid tones get half the 'movement' of whites, shadow tones get nearly nothing.

WB blue/amber control moves the Red channel white point opposite the Blue channel white point.

WB green/magenta control moves the combined Red/Blue channel white points opposite the Green channel white point.

And ... no WB control fixes color casts that go down into the shadows.

Here's a blog post I made about neutralizing using a saved Lumetri preset with a LUT that has a mask removing all saturated pixels, so in the image and scopes you only see the near-neutral tones. I then use the Creative tab's Shadow and Highlight wheels to neutralize the image ... without making any color judgements visually! ... by using the Vectorscope YUV. (Ignore the parts about the Ripple panel. All changes you can make with a mouse/pen tablet.)

Neutralizing with Creative Tab

I did another post with a longer discussion, slightly different process ...

Neutralizing Revisited

My current process has changed some ... as it will always as one moves through experience levels. There are many ways anything can be done ... and rarely is there only one "right!" way.

Neil

I use cs6 which is pretty old. before Lumetri got introduced to new versions. The auto color correct was always pretty lame ... sometimes making things far worse than the original.

Just so you know... it's not just because it's legacy, it always was kinda bad to use even a long time ago.

Premiere Pro or Premiere Elements or Photoshop Elements?