Mastering Lumetri: A Comprehensive Guide to Colour Correction and Grading

As a motion graphics designer or video editor, you’re probably constantly looking for ways to improve your work and create visually exciting content. One powerful tool at your disposal is colour grading, which can transform the mood, atmosphere and overall impact of a video. Adobe's Lumetri Colour panel, available in both Premiere Pro and After Effects, offers a complete set of tools for enhancing motion graphics through advanced colour manipulation. This article explores how to use Lumetri Colour to take your videos to a more professional level.

Understanding Lumetri Colour

Lumetri Colour is a comprehensive colour grading toolset that allows precise control over various aspects of your footage or video. It provides a non-destructive workflow, meaning you can always revert to your original content if needed. The panel is divided into several sections, each focusing on different aspects of colour manipulation:

• Basic Correction
• Creative
• Curves
• Colour Wheels and Match
• HSL Secondary
• Vignette

Each of these sections offers unique capabilities for enhancing your video project.

Basic Correction: Setting the Foundation

The Basic Correction section is where you begin the colour grading process. Here, you can adjust fundamental aspects of your video, such as:

White Balance: Correcting white balance is essential for ensuring colour accuracy in your video. Use the Temperature and Tint sliders to eliminate unwanted colour casts, ensure neutral whites and greys and create a consistent colour temperature across different scenes or elements.

Exposure: Fine-tuning exposure is critical for achieving the desired brightness in your video. The Exposure slider allows you to adjust the overall luminance of your video, correct under or over-exposed elements and ensure key visual elements are properly visible.

Contrast: Contrast adjustment helps define the visual depth of your video. Use the Contrast slider to enhance the difference between light and dark areas, create depth and dimensionality in flat videos and emphasise important elements within your work.

Highlights and Shadows: Independent control over highlights and shadows allows for nuanced adjustments. In highlights, you can recover detail in bright areas or create a more ethereal look. In shadowed areas, you could add depth to dark areas or lift shadows for a flatter, more stylised appearance.

For video, these tools are particularly useful for ensuring your videos have the correct base exposure and contrast. This is crucial for maintaining consistency across different scenes or elements within your video.

Creative Looks: Adding style to your videos

The Creative section of Lumetri Colour allows you to apply pre-set looks or create your own. This can be an excellent starting point for establishing a specific style for your motion graphics project. Some key features in this section include:

Look: The Look dropdown menu offers a variety of pre-set colour grades. You can browse through categories such as Cinematic, Stylised or Vintage. With Preview, you look directly on your video. You can also load custom LUTs (Look-Up Tables) for brand-specific colour schemes.

Adjustments: You have the ability to fine-tune the creative look with additional controls. For example, Faded Film will add a vintage or nostalgic feel to your video. You can also use Sharpness to enhance edge definition for crisper graphics and Vibrance to intelligently boost less saturated colours without affecting skin tones.

Saturation: With this you can control the overall colour intensity of your motion graphics. You could increase saturation for bold, eye-catching videos, decrease it for a more subdued or professional look, or create monochrome videos by reducing saturation to zero.

When working with motion graphics, the Creative section can help you quickly establish a cohesive colour palette across your entire project. This is particularly useful when working on brand-specific videos or when trying to evoke a particular mood.

Curves: Precision Control for Colour and Tone

The Curves section in the Lumetri Colour plugin offers a powerful toolset for achieving precise control over both colour and tonal adjustments in your motion graphics. By adjusting various curve-based settings, you can fine-tune the overall look and feel of your video, allowing for a high degree of creative flexibility. Here are the key features within the Curves section:

RGB Curves: The RGB Curves allow you to manipulate the red, green and blue channels independently or together. This control is ideal for adjusting the brightness and contrast across the tonal range of your video. You can create smoother transitions between shadows, midtones and highlights, ensuring that your scene's lighting and colours look natural or stylised, depending on your needs. A common use of RGB curves is balancing colour and contrast, such as warming up skin tones or cooling down a scene to create a specific mood.

Hue vs Saturation: The Hue vs Saturation curve is crucial for controlling the intensity of specific colours in your video. By selecting a specific hue and adjusting its saturation, you can make certain colours pop or recede. For instance, you might boost the saturation of blues in a sky or tone down the intensity of reds in an object, helping draw attention to key elements without overwhelming the viewer with overly bright colours. This is particularly useful when you want to maintain a cohesive look across different elements in your motion graphics.

Hue vs Hue: This curve allows for selective hue shifting, letting you change one colour into another without affecting the rest of the image. It’s an effective tool for situations where brand guidelines require precise colour control, as you can alter the hue of a specific colour without influencing other parts of your video. For example, you can shift a blue logo to green, while keeping the rest of the colours unchanged. This is particularly helpful for brand consistency, client revisions, or adding creative flair to certain elements.

Luma vs Saturation: The Luma vs Saturation curve gives you control over the saturation of an image based on its brightness levels. You can use it to desaturate shadows while keeping the highlights vibrant, which is a popular effect for creating a stylised look in motion graphics. For example, by reducing saturation in the darker areas of a scene, you can create a moody, cinematic feel while maintaining vivid, colourful highlights to draw the viewer's eye to important details. This technique is also useful for enhancing depth and dimension in your video, making certain elements stand out more effectively.

For motion graphics designers, the Curves section is invaluable for creating specific colour effects. For example, you can use the Hue vs Hue curve to shift a brand colour slightly without affecting other colours in your video. The Luma vs Saturation curve can help create a stylised look by de-saturating shadows while keeping highlights vibrant.

Colour Wheels and Match: Balancing Your Video

The Colour Wheels and Match section of Lumetri Colour offers versatile controls for fine-tuning the colour balance across different tonal ranges - shadows, midtones, and highlights. This makes it an essential tool for ensuring that your video’s visual tone feels cohesive, especially when working with multiple elements or scenes. Each wheel corresponds to a different range, allowing you to adjust colours independently, giving you a lot of flexibility in refining your look. Here’s how you can use this feature effectively:

Creating colour contrast between different elements in your video: One of the key uses of the Colour Wheels is to create contrast between various parts of your video. By pushing the image towards cooler tones (such as blue) or warmer tones (like orange), you can dramatically change the look. This can also help to visually separate elements in your video, making key components stand out while enhancing the depth and atmosphere of the overall scene. For example, in a video featuring both text and background imagery, you might want to darken the background shadows while brightening the highlights, creating a visual contrast that draws the viewer’s attention where it’s needed most.

Matching colour grades across scenes or elements: When your project involves multiple scenes or elements that need to look like they belong together, the Colour Match feature becomes indispensable. It allows you to harmonise the colour grade across different shots, ensuring that they blend seamlessly, even if they were created separately or shot under varying lighting conditions. The "Match" feature uses Adobe Sensei technology to automatically analyse and match the colour of a reference frame to your target frame, making it easier to achieve consistency across your entire video.

Adding a subtle colour cast to specific tonal ranges for stylistic effect: You can also use the Colour Wheels to introduce subtle colour casts into specific tonal ranges, adding mood and stylistic flair to your video. This is particularly useful if you're trying to evoke a particular emotion or atmosphere. For example, adding a slight blue tint to the image can create a colder, more subdued feel, while warming it up can make the scene appear more inviting and bright.

This technique can be applied selectively to specific sections of your video, ensuring that different moments communicate the right tone without being visually jarring. Whether you're aiming for a dreamy, nostalgic look or something more futuristic or high-contrast, the Colour Wheels can help fine-tune the emotional impact of your visuals.

When working with complex motion graphics that combine multiple elements or scenes, the Colour Wheels can help you create a cohesive look across your entire project.

HSL Secondary: Targeting Specific Colours

The HSL Secondary section of Lumetri Colour offers advanced tools for isolating and adjusting specific colour ranges within your video. This feature is particularly useful when you need to make precise adjustments to specific hues, without affecting the rest of the image. It works by selecting a certain hue, saturation, and luminance range (HSL) and then applying targeted corrections, giving you a high degree of control over how individual colours are displayed.

Adjust a specific brand colour without affecting others: In motion graphics, especially those tied to branding, maintaining accurate colour representation is crucial. The HSL Secondary tools allow you to zero in on a brand colour - such as a company's specific shade of red or blue - and make adjustments to its hue, saturation or luminance without disturbing the other colours in the video. This ensures that your project stays on-brand, even after colour grading, and is particularly helpful when adhering to strict brand guidelines. For example, if you need to brighten a brand’s specific green while keeping the rest of the image untouched, the HSL Secondary lets you isolate that exact hue and adjust its properties to achieve the desired effect.

Create eye-catching effects by manipulating individual colours: HSL Secondary also opens up opportunities for creating dramatic, eye-catching effects. By isolating a particular colour and adjusting its saturation or hue, you can make certain elements of your video stand out. You might, for instance, desaturate the entire scene except for one vibrant colour, directing the viewer’s attention to a specific part of the video, such as a logo or key product feature.

Another creative use is to completely shift a colour for artistic purposes - for example, turning all the blues in a scene to a bright red to create a surreal or stylised effect that heightens the visual interest.

Correct or enhance particular elements within your video: The precision offered by the HSL Secondary section also makes it invaluable for correcting colour issues or enhancing specific elements within your project. For example, you can use it to adjust skin tones in a character video, ensuring that they look natural and balanced, even if the lighting or other elements in the scene have been heavily altered. Similarly, it allows you to enhance colours that may appear washed out or dull after initial grading, bringing them back to life and ensuring they play a more prominent role in the final visual composition.

By providing such granular control, HSL Secondary is a key tool for ensuring that every element of your motion graphics project looks exactly as you intend. Whether it’s fine-tuning a brand’s colour palette, creating artistic effects, or correcting colour inaccuracies, this section allows you to deliver polished, professional results.

Applying Lumetri Colour in Your Workflow

When incorporating Lumetri Colour into your motion graphics workflow, consider the following tips:

Start with basic correction: Ensure your video has the correct exposure and white balance before moving on to more creative adjustments. This foundational step is crucial for achieving a professional look. For example, use the Temperature and Tint sliders within White Balance to neutralise any colour casts. Use exposure to adjust the overall brightness of your video, contrast to fine-tune the difference between light and dark areas and look at highlights and shadows to refine the brightest and darkest parts of your image. By establishing a solid base, you'll have more flexibility when applying creative looks later in the process.

Use Creative Looks as a starting point: Apply a preset look that closely matches your desired style, then fine-tune with other tools. This approach can save time and inspire new creative directions. You can do this by browsing through the preset looks in the Creative section and experiment with different categories eg, Cinematic, Stylised and Vintage. You can use the Intensity slider to control the strength of the applied look and the Adjustments sliders (Faded Film, Sharpness, Vibrance) to further refine the look. Remember that these presets are just starting points - you can always customise them to fit your specific needs.

Use Adjustment Layers: Apply Lumetri Colour effects to adjustment layers for more flexibility and non-destructive editing. This technique offers several advantages. For one thing, it’s easy to toggle on and off, so you can quickly compare your graded and ungraded video. Adjustment Layers provide the flexibility of being able to apply different grades to specific sections of your timeline. Their non-destructive nature means you can preserve your original footage while experimenting with different looks. The fact that they’re stackable means that you can use multiple adjustment layers for complex grading techniques. To create an adjustment layer, just right-click in your Project panel and select New Item > Adjustment Layer.

Utilise Scopes: Use the built-in scopes (such as the Vectorscope and Waveform) to ensure your colours are within legal broadcast ranges and to maintain consistency across your project. Waveform lets you monitor overall luminance and ensure proper exposure and Vectorscope lets you check balance and saturation levels. RGB Parade is used to analyse individual colour channels for colour casts or imbalances and Histogram lets you evaluate the distribution of tones in your image. Scopes in general provide objective measurements of your colour and luminance values, helping you achieve consistent and broadcast-safe results.

Create Custom Looks: Save your colour grading settings as Custom Looks for quick application to other projects or to maintain consistency across a series of videos. With Custom Looks, you can develop your unique style and create looks that reflect your brand or project requirements. They also save you time, by letting you quickly apply consistent grades across multiple projects and help ensure colour consistency when collaborating with others. Many Lumetri users build a library of looks that let them continually improve and expand their capabilities. To save a custom look, click the menu icon at the top of the Lumetri Colour panel and select "Save Preset”.

Conclusion

By mastering these techniques, video editors can significantly enhance the visual appeal and professional quality of their work. However, it's worth noting that effective colour grading with Lumetri Colour requires more than just technical knowledge. It demands a keen eye for colour, an understanding of colour theory and the ability to use these tools creatively to achieve specific visual goals.

As the field of motion graphics continues to evolve, staying current with the latest colour grading techniques and tools is essential. The Lumetri Colour panel is regularly updated with new features and improvements, offering motion graphics professionals new ways to improve their skills. Continuous learning and experimentation with these tools are key to staying competitive in this dynamic field.

In conclusion, Lumetri Colour offers editors a powerful toolset for enhancing their videos through sophisticated colour grading. By mastering these tools and incorporating them effectively into your workflow, you can create visually impressive motion graphics that captivate your audience and take your professional work to new heights.