An overview of color-oriented effects
Premiere Pro has more than 20 video effects that adjust or enhance color. Some have narrow functionality while others are professional-level tools that take a lot of trial and error to gain some level of expertise. There are entire books on color correction and a good number of video editors who specialize in that field.Premiere Pro offers a wide range of possibilitiesmore than enough to spark some ideas for your upcoming video projects.To get an idea of what Premiere Pro has to offer in the color effect department, click the Effects tab and type color in the Contains text box. That displays 18 effects. There are several more that have to do with color.I have grouped the color-oriented effects into four categories and listed them within those groups from simplest to most complex (more or less). This taxonomy is one example of why you might want to create and organize some custom effects bins. Here's a brief overview of the color effects (**covered in this mini-lesson):
Coloring effects
- Tint A simple way to apply an overall color cast to a clip.
- Change Color Like Tint but with more control, and you can change a wider range of colors.
- Ramp Creates a linear or radial color gradient that blends with the original image colors.
- 4 Color Gradient Like the Titler's eponymous feature. But this has more options and you can keyframe the parameters for some wild results.
- Paint Bucket Paint areas of a scene with a solid color.
- Brush Strokes Apply a painted look to a clip.
- Channel Blur Creates a glow by blurring red, green or blue channels separately and in user-specified directions.
Color removing or replacing
- Color Pass** Converts an entire clip to grayscale with the exception of a user-specified color.
- Color Replace** Changes a user-selected color in a scene to a different user-specified color.
- Leave Color Similar to Color Pass with much more control.
- Change to Color Like Color Replace but with more options and control.
Color correction
- Color Balance, Color Balance (HLS), and Color Balance (RGB) Color Balance offers the most control over red, green and blue values in midtones, shadows and highlights. HLS and RGB control only overall hue, saturation and luminance or red, green, and blue colors.
- Auto Color A quick, simple generic color balance.
- RGB Color Corrector and RGB Curves Offer even more control than Color Balance, including controls over the tonal range of shadows and highlights, and controls for midtones values (gamma ), brightness (pedestal ), and contrast (gain ).
- Luma Color and Luma Curve Adjust brightness and contrast in the highlights, midtones and shadows of a clip. Also correct hue, saturation and luma in a selected color range.
- Color Match** A useful but diffcult-to-master tool that lets you take scenes with different color lighting and have their overall color schemes match. In this way you can color match scenes shot under fluorescent lights (blue-green) with scenes shot with tungsten lights (orange).
- Fast Color Corrector** This is a tool you will likely use frequently. It lets you make instant color changes that you can preview in a split-screen view within the Program Monitor.
- Three-Way Color Corrector Gives you the ability to make more subtle corrections by letting you adjust hue, saturation, and luminance for highlights, midtones, and shadows.
Technical color effects
- Broadcast Colors Conforms video to display properly on TV sets. Corrects problems created by overly bright colors and geometric patterns due to some effects or added graphics.
- Video Limiter Like Broadcast Colors but gives you much more precise control to preserve much of the original video quality while conforming to broadcast TV standards.