Good tutorial on UW Color balancing with Premire 2019??

Hello Folks,

I am struggling with color correction in Premire. I am playing with RGB curves in a color workspace but the lumetri Scopes keep going all over the place.

My content is a shark dive so there are shifts from reef sharks to sandy ocean floor. I am never getting a good gray and everything is washed out in cyan tones.

Being new, I suspect it is all part of my learning curve but hoped someone might have some good resources to share.

https://www.pbrosnanphoto.com/Travel/Bahamas-2018/i-56G7BQL/A

Watching this too.... I know what im doing with PS/LR but Premiere has nothing in common!

I asked a similar question in another forum and the answer was quite helpful:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4338953#forum-post-61919026

Wolfgang

You need to have close to real color video to begin with before doing any color grading. You're not shooting RAW, so you can't restore color from a green tinted video. First rule of shooting underwater video is learn how to custom white balance.

I had a look and grabbed a screen shot from the paused video and looked at the histogram. You have a red peak on the LHS of the histogram and the green and blue are centred over to the mid RHS. What this represents is an overall lack of red and the image is all in the greens and blues. To have any hope of colour correcting I would be able to correct that screen grab in PS, but when you attempt it it creates all sorts of colour noise. Basically a complete lack of red in the image, so there's nothing to work with.

On a side note what is it with video colour work that they have present you with colour wheels and other devices. Levels once you know what's going on is so intuitive and you work directly on the histogram. Seems like they invented these new things to try and differentiate the software from still processing apps.

Thanks for the info. I will work on quickly setting a WB

I had a look and grabbed a screen shot from the paused video and looked at the histogram. You have a red peak on the LHS of the histogram and the green and blue are centred over to the mid RHS. What this represents is an overall lack of red and the image is all in the greens and blues. To have any hope of colour correcting I would be able to correct that screen grab in PS, but when you attempt it it creates all sorts of colour noise. Basically a complete lack of red in the image, so there's nothing to work with.

 

On a side note what is it with video colour work that they have present you with colour wheels and other devices. Levels once you know what's going on is so intuitive and you work directly on the histogram. Seems like they invented these new things to try and differentiate the software from still processing apps.

Personally, I find waveform representations of an image vastly superior to a histogram and much easier to use as a reference when grading. I wish I could have a waveform display in Lightroom/Photoshop.

I'm not sure what you mean specifically by levels -- do you mean the exposure/highlights/shadows/whites/blacks sliders in Lightroom? Most programs, FCPX, Premiere and DaVinci Resolve included, allow you to use curves to adjust exposure and things like contrast, color balance and saturation, not just color wheels. The Lumetri panel in Premiere (based on my limited use) tries to be somewhat similar to Lightroom/Adobe Camera Raw also. Really, the luminance part of the color wheel works very similarly to the exposure/highlights/shadows slider in Lightroom. But they offer the additional option to push a certain color cast into only a certain luminance range in your image. You can't really do that with photo editing software for the most part without applying luminance masks.

One feature I miss a lot when color grading is Lightroom's "Dehaze" slider. Something like that which boosts local contrast and saturation could do wonders for underwater video. I don't know of any easy way to replicate it in FCPX or Davinci Resolve.

 

Personally, I find waveform representations of an image vastly superior to a histogram and much easier to use as a reference when grading. I wish I could have a waveform display in Lightroom/Photoshop.

 

I'm not sure what you mean specifically by levels -- do you mean the exposure/highlights/shadows/whites/blacks sliders in Lightroom? Most programs, FCPX, Premiere and DaVinci Resolve included, allow you to use curves to adjust exposure and things like contrast, color balance and saturation, not just color wheels. The Lumetri panel in Premiere (based on my limited use) tries to be somewhat similar to Lightroom/Adobe Camera Raw also. Really, the luminance part of the color wheel works very similarly to the exposure/highlights/shadows slider in Lightroom. But they offer the additional option to push a certain color cast into only a certain luminance range in your image. You can't really do that with photo editing software for the most part without applying luminance masks.

 

One feature I miss a lot when color grading is Lightroom's "Dehaze" slider. Something like that which boosts local contrast and saturation could do wonders for underwater video. I don't know of any easy way to replicate it in FCPX or Davinci Resolve.

There is a dehase VFX on Resolve, have you tried it?

There is a dehase VFX on Resolve, have you tried it?

Is that plug-in ? or what I can use any version of Resolve?

Interesting, I hadn't seen the Dehaze in Davinci Resolve before. It seems the effect is fairly subtle though even at full intensity. I guess you could always stack multiple ones. I'm going to experiment with it more and see how it compares to the version in lightroom.

Unfortunately, it's a Davinci Resolve Studio feature, so you need the full studio version to use it.

Interesting, I hadn't seen the Dehaze in Davinci Resolve before. It seems the effect is fairly subtle though even at full intensity. I guess you could always stack multiple ones. I'm going to experiment with it more and see how it compares to the version in lightroom.

 

Unfortunately, it's a Davinci Resolve Studio feature, so you need the full studio version to use it.

you can try it in combination with a midtone details increase or even increasing sharpening

First rule of shooting underwater video is learn how to custom white balance.

Thats all well and good but if you're over a few metres depth then typically a correctly white balanced photo or video means the water column loses most of its blue colour so looks washed out if you arent using a filter.