Color Correction and Grading (LUTs)

Premiere Elements provides a professional-quality color correction and grading tool, allowing you to grade your footage directly on your editing timeline.

Difference Between Color Correction and Color Grading

• Color Correction: The process of adjusting and balancing the colors of your footage to achieve a neutral, true-to-life look. This step ensures that the colors appear natural and consistent across all your clips.

• Color Grading: Adds a creative or stylistic look to your footage after color correction. This step involves enhancing or altering colors to produce specific moods, aesthetics, or themes, such as giving a vintage, cinematic, or high-contrast look.

These color tools are available in Color Correction and Grading panel in Premiere Elements. Using these tools, you can adjust your clips' color, contrast, and light in new and innovative ways. With editing and color grading working hand in hand, you can freely move between editing and grading tasks without exporting or launching a separate grading application.

The Color Correction and Grading panel is designed for experienced colorists and editors new to color grading. You can apply simple color corrections or complex Creative using intuitive sliders and controls. You can also easily adjust cuts or fine-tune grades using advanced color correction tools like curves and color wheels. 

Premiere Elements provides a preset Color Correction and Grading panel that makes your task of color grading quicker and more efficient.

Select Tools > Color Correction and Grading. The Color Correction and Grading opens to the right of the Program Monitor.

The Color Correction and Grading panel offers powerful and easy-to-use color tools, like curves, color wheels, and slider arrangements, arranged in different sections. Each section of the Color Correction and Grading panel focuses on a specific task of the color workflow.

The Color Correction and Grading panel displays different analyses of luma and chroma as waveforms based on your adjustments, letting you evaluate as you grade your clips.

General color correction workflow

Apply basic color correction

Using controls in the Basic Correction section, you can correct video that’s too dark or too light, and adjust both the hue (color or chroma) and luminance (exposure and contrast) in your clip.  

To adjust a control, drag the slider until you achieve the desired result. Or, you can set a specific value in the box next to the sliders. To select the box and type a new value, click the current value.

Creative LUTs and Input LUTs

LUT is an acronym for Look Up Table. It processes a color value and outputs a corresponding value. You can use LUTs to manipulate saturation and contrast, or completely change the color of a clip. LUTs are commonly used to create and save color grades that can be applied to give your clips a unique style.

You can apply creative LUTs from the Creative section under the Color Correction and Grading panel. For more information, see Creative.

Premiere Elements classifies LUTs into two categories:

• Input LUT: An Input LUT interprets footage. It is applied on flat log footage to enhance and color-correct footage. You can use it as a starting point for grading footage. 
• Creative LUT: This is a LUT designed to change a clip's appearance and color style. Apply looks to make your video look like a professionally shot film.

How to add LUTs

To add a LUT, do the following:

The LUT is applied on the clip. You can then edit the white balance and tone of the clip.