color correction help for CS6

[perckevin]

Help!

My cameraman forgot to reset his lighting preset on the camera.  So white walls came out Blue in his footage.  I've tried many videos to work on white balance, fast color correction, learned about the different scopes available, RGB lines... and I cannot find a way to make this problem more true to life.  can someone please help me find a good solution?  I have several tracks to mix within the next few days.

photo of problem below

[Michael Grenadier]

CS6 is old...  Haven't worked in it years.  The newer versions of Premiere have much more sophisticated color correction tools but they have something of a steep learning curve.   but there is a white balance selector which uses an eyedropper which you click on an area that's supposed to be white.  Often gets you much closer although the color correction experts will probably sneer at it.  Have no idea if anything like that was available in CS6. 

[R Neil Haugen]

I think way back in CS6 you would need to use the Fast Color Corrector effect for this. It was called something like that.  Been years since I opened CS6.

Neil

[Richard M Knight]

This is the fast colour effect, with the white balance highlit, the trick is to find something white to balance that is not clipped you could try the music on the stand at the far left. Once you have it looking better, copy and paste the effect to the other clips.

If, by some luck, you cameraman was using some kind of RAW file format often the white balance is only metadata and can be changed in the cameras RAW plugin.

[perckevin]

Mr. Knight

Thank you for your response.  I did try the fast color corrector exactly the way you stated, but I cannot get it to look anywhere close to true colors. After playing with several other options I got something acceptable, but it's still jarring when switching to another camera and angle.  Is this just the nature of video editing, or limitations of CS6?

kevin

[Michael Grenadier]

you're attempting to do something that can pose issues for people who've been doing this for many many years and on outdated software.  Recent versions of Premiere offer a feature that will attempt to match 2 shots.  Doesn't always work very well...  One workflow that can help matching shots is to learn to read video scopes but again, this is just part of what you need to know.  Don't mean to be discouraging, just trying to set realistic expectations.   There are lots of tutorials available on the adobe support site and on youtube, but you might take a look at Linkedin Learning (formerly Lynda.com).  It costs something but a month or 2 wouldn't be prohibitive.  There tutorials tend to be more comprehensive on specific subjects (at least in my experience). 

Or you might just want to hire someone to fix these specific shots...  I'm a jack of all trades, and besides editing do fairly sophisticated color correction and audio sweetening, but there are times where I know it's smarter to turn to someone who specializes in these areas... 

[R Neil Haugen]

I teach color correction in Premiere Pro over at MixingLight.com, a pro colorist's subscription website. Most of the members there are based in Resolve or Baselight of course. And Mgrenadier is correct, that clip would be a problem in 'current' software, and CS6 is relatively ancient.

There's a reason none of us have been trying to fix stuff like that in the older versions. There are vastly better tools in the newer software, whether you're using Premiere Pro, Avid, Davinci Resolve, whatever.

But the problem you've got is there is a good chance you can't completely fix that clip. That's a horrific thing to try and recover from, especially as there's not much data there to work with. So to get rid of the jarring changes, what you will probably need to do is painful.

You may well want to pay to have this and any other clips from that camera fixed elsewhere. Because the "fix" is to get the best you can from this camera's clips, then match the others to this.

That's something colorists oft have to do ... say with a job shot on 6K Red or Alexxa cameras with Cooke or other high-end lenses, then the director has some parts of a scene shot on a DSLR or something for the location they can stuff the camera into or the "feel" of the shot. And in the edited scene, they cut between the Red/Alexxa-Cooke clips and the GoPro constantly.

You simply can't make a Canon DSLR or GoPro totally "fit" into the scene cutting between that and the Red clips The crud clips have so much less resolution and color depth. So ... you have to bring the Red clips on either side of the crud clips ... down close enough to crud the changes through the scene don't jar your eyeballs.

And then blend back to good image work as you get out of that section, without anyone noticing what you've done. THAT ... takes skill.

Neil