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Correct and match colors between shots

Last updated on Aug 16, 2023

Adobe Premiere Pro User Guide
Beta releases
1. Beta Program Overview
2. Premiere Pro Beta Home
3. Beta features
  1. New Spectrum UI
  2. Color management system
Getting started
1. Get started with Adobe Premiere Pro
2. What's new in Premiere Pro
3. Best practices for updating Premiere Pro
4. Keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Pro
5. Accessibility in Premiere Pro
6. Frequently asked questions
7. Release notes
Hardware and operating system requirements
1. Hardware recommendations
2. System requirements
3. GPU and GPU Driver requirements
4. GPU Accelerated Rendering & Hardware Encoding/Decoding
Creating projects
1. Start a new project
2. Open projects
3. Move and delete projects
4. Work with multiple open projects
5. Work with Project Shortcuts
6. Backward compatibility of Premiere Pro projects
7. Open and edit Premiere Rush projects in Premiere Pro
8. Best Practices: Create your own project templates
Workspaces and workflows
1. Workspaces
2. Import and export FAQs
3. Working with Panels
4. Windows touch and gesture controls
5. Use Premiere Pro in a dual-monitor setup
Frame.io
1. Install and activate Frame.io
2. Use Frame.io with Premiere Pro and After Effects
3. Integrate Adobe Workfront and Frame.io
4. Share for review with Frame.io
5. Invite collaborators to co-edit a project
6. Frequently asked questions
Import media
1. Importing
2. Importing from Avid or Final Cut
  1. Importing AAF project files from Avid Media Composer
  2. Importing XML project files from Final Cut Pro 7 and Final Cut Pro X
3. File formats
  1. Supported file formats
  2. Support for Blackmagic RAW
4. Working with timecode
Editing
1. Edit video
2. Sequences
3. Cut and trim clips
4. Video
5. Audio
6. Text-Based Editing
  1. Text-Based Editing
  2. Text-Based Editing FAQs
7. Advanced editing
  1. Multi-camera editing workflow
  2. Editing VR
8. Best Practices
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1. Overview of video effects and transitions
2. Effects
3. Transitions
Titles, Graphics, and Captions
1. Overview of the Essential Graphics panel
2. Graphics and Titles
3. Graphics
4. Captions
5. Best Practices: Faster graphics workflows
6. Retiring the Legacy Titler FAQs
7. Upgrade Legacy titles to Source Graphics
Fonts and emojis
1. Color fonts
2. Emojis
Animation and Keyframing
1. Adding, navigating, and setting keyframes
2. Animating effects
3. Use Motion effect to edit and animate clips
4. Optimize keyframe automation
5. Moving and copying keyframes
6. Viewing and adjusting effects and keyframes
Compositing
1. Compositing, alpha channels, and adjusting clip opacity
2. Masking and tracking
3. Blending modes
Color Correction and Grading
1. Overview: Color workflows in Premiere Pro
2. Color Settings
3. Auto Color
4. Get creative with color using Lumetri looks
5. Adjust color using RGB and Hue Saturation Curves
6. Correct and match colors between shots
7. Using HSL Secondary controls in the Lumetri Color panel
8. Create vignettes
9. Looks and LUTs
10. Lumetri scopes
11. Display Color Management
12. Timeline tone mapping
13. HDR for broadcasters
14. Enable DirectX HDR support
Exporting media
1. Export video
2. Export Preset Manager
3. Workflow and overview for exporting
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7. Exporting projects for other applications
8. Exporting OMF files for Pro Tools
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10. Export settings
11. Best Practices: Export faster
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1. Collaboration in Premiere Pro
2. Get started with collaborative video editing
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Long form and Episodic workflows
1. Long Form and Episodic Workflow Guide
2. Using Productions
3. How clips work across projects in a Production
4. Best Practices: Working with Productions
Working with other Adobe applications
1. After Effects and Photoshop
2. Dynamic Link
3. Audition
4. Prelude
Organizing and Managing Assets
1. Working in the Project panel
2. Organize assets in the Project panel
3. Playing assets
4. Search assets
5. Creative Cloud Libraries
6. Sync Settings in Premiere Pro
7. Consolidate, transcode, and archive projects
8. Managing metadata
9. Best Practices
  1. Best Practices: Learning from broadcast production
  2. Best Practices: Working with native formats
Improving Performance and Troubleshooting
1. Set preferences
2. Reset and restore preferences
3. Recovery Mode
4. Working with Proxies
  1. Proxy overview
  2. Ingest and Proxy Workflow
5. Check if your system is compatible with Premiere Pro
6. Premiere Pro for Apple silicon
7. Eliminate flicker
8. Interlacing and field order
9. Smart rendering
10. Control surface support
11. Best Practices: Working with native formats
12. Knowledge Base
Extensions and plugins
1. Installing plugins and extensions in Premiere Pro
2. Latest plugins from third-party developers
Video and audio streaming
1. Secure Reliable Transport (SRT)
Monitoring Assets and Offline Media
1. Monitoring assets
  1. Using the Source Monitor and Program Monitor
  2. Using the Reference Monitor
2. Offline media

Use the color wheels in the Lumetri color panel to make subtle color corrections in your shot. You can also quickly match color between different shots to make the overall look of your video consistent.

Three way color correction using the Color Wheel

A. Midtones color wheel B. Cursor or color puck C. Highlights color wheel D. Slider E. Shadows color wheel

Color wheels allow you to make color adjustments to just the dark or light areas of a shot. The extra control can help you fix subtle problems in clips and add nuance to a look you are creating.

Premiere Pro offers three color wheels - to adjust midtones, shadows, and highlights. With the three-way color correction, you can adjust the brightness, hue, and saturation for shadows, midtones, and highlights independently.

You can adjust the shadow or highlight detail to brighten or darken areas in an otherwise well-lit clip. You can isolate the regions that need correction and apply these adjustments. Use the Midtone color wheel to adjust the overall contrast of the clip.

Another option is to use the accompanying sliders instead of the wheels to make these adjustments.

Click the wheel to add color.

Wheels with empty centers indicate that no adjustments have been made. Click in the middle of the wheel and drag the cursor to fill in the wheels and make adjustments as required.

Drag the slider to adjust color.

To use the slider control, drag the slider up to increase the value or drag the slider down to decrease the value. For example, drag the Shadow slider up to lighten shadows, and drag the Highlights shadow down to darken highlights.

Match color between shots

Color Matching allows you to compare looks of two different shots across an entire sequence to ensure color and light appearances match within a scene or across multiple scenes.

To match the "current shot" (the selected clip under the playhead):

Switch to Comparison View.

Click the Comparison View button in the Program Monitor or in the Lumetri Color panel. This view allows you to select and display a reference frame, and compare colors across shots.

Use one of these options to switch to Comparison View
Choose a reference frame.

Select the reference position via a slider bar, timecode, or by jumping between edit points with arrows. Select the target location by simply positioning the playhead over the desired clip. Once you have both the reference and target locations set, you can adjust the comparison view to the desired display. Choose either a side-by-side or a vertical/horizontal split display. In split mode, you can drag the location of the split to view a specific area of the screen.

Choose a reference frame
Choose a target clip.
1. Position the timeline playhead over a clip you want to match to the reference frame.
2. Make sure the clip is selected.
Choose a target clip

The current frame is matched to the reference frame, so if the content changes over time, choose a part of the clip that is a good indication of the overall color and brightness of the clip.
(Optional) Disable Face Detection.

If you have faces in the shots, leave this option enabled.

Note:

Face Detection is on by default, and if Auto Color detects faces in either the reference or current frame it gives higher weight to the colors in the facial region.

This feature yields higher quality matches of skin tone especially when there are distracting colors in the background, but you can disable it for situations where you want or need the whole frame to be evaluated equally.

If you use face detection, there is a slight increase in the amount of time it takes to calculate the match. If you are working with footage that does not contain any faces, disable face detection to speed up the color matching.
Click Apply Match.

Premiere Pro automatically applies Lumetri settings using the Color Wheels and Saturation control to match the colors in the current frame to the colors in the reference frame.

The Color Wheels (and Saturation slider if necessary) update to reflect the adjustment that the automatic color matching algorithm has applied.
If you are not satisfied with the results, you can use another shot as a reference, and match the colors again. Premiere Pro overrides the previous changes, and matches the color with the new reference shot.