Color Correction Automatization

[Anita Puchała]

Hey! Is there any way to automate basic color correction in Adobe Premiere? My videos are about an hour long, and I record them with a LUT already applied, so I only need to adjust the highlights, shadows, blacks, and whites based on Lumetri Scopes. This process is very tedious and repetitive—can it be automated?

[Ann Bens]

Make a preset and apply that to your footage.

[Anita Puchała]

Unfortunately this is not so easy. Every footage has some diffrence in the exposition, highlights level, blacks level etc. One and the same present is not correct for every footage 🙂

[Ann Bens]

 Every footage has some diffrence

By @Anita Puchała

Then unfortunately then it's a manually adjusting the sliders.

[R Neil Haugen]

That's why I said you create several presets, named for what they do.

Even a Tangent Ripple would vastly speed your color correction work, by the way. Not expensive but useful for nearly all editing things. You can even resize/rotate/position things with them.

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

I work for/with/teach pro colorists. Looking at your post, I have immediate ... questions.

LUTs are not math ... they're simple look-up tables ... charts ... which apps use to manually drag this RGB triplicate to that. There are a few given ... (the number of points) ... and in between those, the app simply does typically a straight-line mod.

LUTs are fixed value tools. So if your image is exposed either lower or higher than the LUT was built for, you will get crushed shadows or clipped highlights. So great care is required.

Which is why colorists basically never apply a LUT of any type without being able to trim the clip into the LUT to keep from getting crushed, clipped, or over-saturated values.

In Premiere there are a couple ways to do this safely.  The easiest is using the Creative tab slot to apply the LUT, then doing the image trimming in the Basic tab. 

The other is by stacking multiple Lumetri ... the second instance with the LUT applied in the Basic tab Input slot, and using the first instance of Lumetri to trim the image.

Auto-color and Auto-match in Lumetri

There are two automated tools for color ... I'm faster manually than using these, but many less-skilled workers love them.

Auto-color in the Basic tab (if I recall correctly!) ... click that, and it tries to make the image as "normal" as possible. Sometimes, it does a nice job.

Auto-Match Color  in the Color Wheels tab of Lumetri.

• Set the first clip color as you wish it to look;
• Set Lumetri into Comparison mode;
• move to the next clip, select a good frame, and click auto-match.

This can, when selecting a pretty close apples to apples pair of images, do a pretty decent job.

[Anita Puchała]

Thank you for the detailed explanation! Hmmmm, so it turns out that you would still have to manually adjust the sliders for highlights, shadows, blacks, and whites, even after applying the LUT in Adobe Premiere.... and that's exactly the tedious adjustment I want to avoid. The Auto function in the Basic Correction panel in Lumetri Color is not satisfactory, and the color match option would only work well for shots within the same scene. What I want is to automate the color correction process for the entire project. I’ll check out the Auto color correction feature in DaVinci Resolve, and if it works well, I’ll export the XML file to it.

[R Neil Haugen]

As a Resolve user, not sure you'll find the options there any better in all. And for full-on editing, Resolve still has some limitations compared to PrPro and Avid. For many, it's ok though.

This is where knowing your camera and producer's media allows you to make a series of presets to drop onto entire batches of clips to speed things along. You spend a bit of time building them, but the application is wicked fast.