HOW TO DO COLOR GRADING IN PREMIERE PRO WITH LUMETRI
Color Grading... what’s the big fuss about?
No matter how good you are with lights and cameras, not every shot is going to be perfectly exposed and not all shots will match. when clouds keep constantly moving changing the exposure in your frame. Maybe a mistake was made in camera with the wrong white balance setting. All this means you’ll need to do color correction to correct for exposure and matching issues.
And if you want that cinematic high-end look or a way to enhance the look of the story this is where color grading comes in. For instance you can go for a zombie apocalypse look with desaturated colors and bright popping reds to convey a rotting lifeless world and bright red when a zombie starts snacking on the living. Alternatively a bright colorful grade will help you set a cheerful mood for a family comedy. Colors help push the audience towards certain moods or feelings, therefore helping them connect more with what’s happening in the story.
The challenge for beginning filmmakers is how to achieve these different kinds of corrections and color grading to help them tell powerful stories. The problem is color grading can have a steep learning curve and the tools aren't always the most intuitive. That's why it's important to find the right tool for your time and budget that will let you produce professional looking video without having to spend years learning the ins and outs of the trade.
That’s why we’ve created a list of the best color grading software currently available, taking a look at their features, strengths, weaknesses and ease of use.
If ease of use is the name of the game look no further. Cinema Grade is a color grading plugin that works with 3 of the most popular editing softwares out there: Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Plus it ditches the old school tools like curves and wheels in favor of direct on-screen grading. You are able to click directly on anything in the viewer you want to change like the exposure of an area or the color of the sky and just drag up or down to change it.
It also has Lightroom style controls for those who come from a photography background, false color mode for getting the perfect exposure, easy color matching, real time previews of LUTs, support for the Xrite color checker chart for doing automatic corrections and a color transfer tool for matching the look of your favorite films. But the biggest advantage of Cinema Grade is its guided workflow. That means all the guesswork is taken out of what corrections to do first, how to match shots, how to save time by applying the same look grades to multiple clips at a time. It is designed to guide you every step of the way.
FINDING THE BEST COLOR GRADING SOFTWARE FOR BEGINNER FILMMAKERS
Compatible with both Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, Colorista is one of the pioneers in terms of color grading plugins. It became a workhorse in times when Premiere and Final Cut had very limited native color tools. It provides color wheels, curves, hue vs saturation tools and support for log to rec709 LUTs. The layout can seem a little messy, especially for a beginner, but it has a guided correction function that works as a quick tutorial for performing base corrections.
What is the best color grading software to achieve cinematic look for your films? Long gone are the days when color grading was an obscure art done only on expensive suites with space age looking equipment by a very few chosen ones. Nowadays it is expected for every editor and solo filmmaker to be able to deliver a professional looking grade even if you are rocking an old beat up laptop.
Filmconvert works on Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve and even AVID media composer. It quickly became popular as a film and grain emulation tool. It lets you recreate a wide variety of popular and vintage film stocks with camera specific profiles. It has very limited color correction tools like exposure, temp, tint and saturation, but if you go for the Nitrate version, you get color wheels and curves. Filmconvert is one of the best options out there for recreating the film look but it is more of a look creation tool than a color correction one.
Color Fixer is compatible with Premiere, Final Cut and Avid Media Composer. It’s the option with less features from the bunch, very basic temperature and exposure controls, but that simplicity can become an advantage for beginners who feel overwhelmed by too many tools.
Chromatic is a Final Cut Pro plugin with traditional tools like wheels and curves which Final Cut already has but adds mask tracking. The lack of tracking has been for a long time one of the main features missing from Apple's pro editing software. Chromatic uses Mocha tracker, one of the best trackers in the industry.
Until this point we’ve listed plugins that work within some of the most popular editing softwares. Now let’s take a look at the native color grading tools that come inside editing softwares, starting with some of the less known.
Hitfilm Pro is a standalone editing and VFX software. There is a free version called Hitfilm Express but most of its grading tools are behind a paywall, like scopes, color wheels and LUT support. The complete version includes curves, wheels, hue and saturation controls, keying and mask tracking. Although Hitfilm has lots of tools it is more geared toward vfx than color grading and their interface is not the most intuitive for beginners.
LightWorks has been around for a lot time but never got a lot of traction although its free. It has color wheels, curves and some basic saturation and hue controls, plus a selective correction tool. It’s definitely not the most intuitive interface for grading but it gets the job done.
From the standalone editing softwares we are looking at, Filmora X is certainly the weakest in terms of color grading. It has slider controls for contrast, brightness, temperature, tint, saturation. It’s most eye catching feature is a color match button that to be honest leaves a lot to be desired. On the other hand… its free. For better tools like wheels and curves you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version Filmora Pro.
Vegas Pro has been around for a long time (originally owned by Sony) but has seen better days in terms of popularity. Mainly an editing software, it has grading tools like wheels, color curves, masks and LUT support. The interface is not exactly the best looking one or the most intuitive. It is good enough for basic color correction, but not the best option for creating cinematic looking color grades.
Final Cut needs no introduction. It’s not only a great editing software, but a great vfx and color grading tool when combined with the right third party plugins. But how about its native color tools? Color wheels, curves, hue saturation curves, shape and color masks, Final Cut has the complete set of every day color tools with a clean, straight forward design. The cons… lack of tracking and a guided workflow. For most scenarios as a beginner you’ll find what you need, but you may not know where to start.
Premiere is a pretty similar case to Final Cut. The Lumetri panel offers most color tools you’ll need on an everyday basis with the added bonus of mask tracking. The problem… the lumetri panel is quite crowded, making difficult for a beginner to figure out a workflow or how each tool works.
Resolve is the king of the bunch. While the others are editing softwares that include some grading tools, Resolve is a professional color grading software that has expanded over the years to include editing, vfx and audio mixing. It obviously has the best and biggest set of tools but again, so many tools can confuse the beginning filmmaker. Add to that the node based system and those who are used to layer based systems may find themselves curling up in the fetal position. Resolve is the king of all features but the learning curve is steep. It is also worth mentioning the free version has almost every tool you’ll need for most projects.
And those are the 12 best and most popular color grading software tools that are out there. It’s a lot to chew on right? So let’s take it a step further to help you narrow it down to just one. Spots 1 through 5 are plugins that offer tools and layouts more intuitive or easier to use than the ones that are built into your editing software. Your choice may also depend on limitations like which operating systems and editing softwares that are supported. If they have a free trial we recommend trying the software out first. If you're just starting out or don't want to specialize as a colorist these make a lot of sense.
But being plugins you may run into issues if you hand off a project to another person as the plugin will need to be installed on the other person's system. If you don't want to hassle with that, that means picking from one of the ones from spots 6 through 12. For what it's worth the mainstream editors or the Big 3 are Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. They likewise will also have the most compatibility with 3rd party plugins. If you happen to be on a Mac and performance is the most important to you then Final Cut Pro is optimally tuned. If you want a complete ecosystem of apps for vfx, audio, photo editing, designing and so on, Premiere as part of the Creative Cloud subscription makes the most sense. And if you are considering turning color grading into a career there's no better way to go than with DaVinci Resolve.
All systems offer about the same in terms of basic features and color toolset with the exception of Cinema Grade which offers a unique innovative approach of color grading directly in the viewer kind of like point-and-click color grading. Many photographers and filmmakers find this approach the most intuitive and fastest way to make their films look professional.
Finally the one that you feel the most comfortable with and provides you with the end result you're looking for should be the one that you go for. And with many offering a free trial you got nothing to lose. Happy grading!