Overview: Color grading workflows in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro provides you professional-quality color grading and color correction tools that let you grade your footage directly on your editing timeline.

These color tools are available within a Lumetri Color workspace in Premiere Pro. Using these tools, you can adjust color, contrast, and light in your sequences in new and innovative ways. With editing and color grading working hand in hand, you can freely move between editing and grading tasks without the need to export or launch a separate grading application.

The Color workspace is designed not just for experienced colorists but also for editors who are new to color grading. You can apply simple color corrections or complex Lumetri Looks using intuitive sliders and controls. Or you can easily adjust cuts or fine-tune grades using advanced color correction tools like curves and color wheels. 

Premiere Pro provides a preset Color workspace that makes your task of color grading quicker and more efficient.

Select Window > Workspace > Color, or choose Color from the workspace switcher. The Color workspace opens a Lumetri Color panel to the right, and a Lumetri Scopes panel to the left of the Program Monitor.

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

The Lumetri Scopes 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.

Create and edit multiple Lumetri color effects

You can create multiple Lumetri color effects, and stack or layer them in the Lumetri Color panel.

Control Surface Support for Lumetri Color

Lumetri panel grading controls can be mapped to control surface devices (such as Tangent Devices - Elements/Wave/Ripple).

To set up a Tangent control surface device:

1. Install Premiere Pro and the Tangent Hub software (See the Tangent Devices Support website for details).  
   
2. In Premiere Pro, click Open Preferences - Control Surface.
3. Click Add and choose Tangent and save PR Project.

PR installs a pre-configured Tangent control mapping layout, which provides a good starting point to control PR/Lumetri. The default mapping has the following modes: [Editing], [Lumetri - Basic],[Lumetri - Creative], [Lumetri - Curves], [Lumetri - Wheels], [Lumetri - HSL], [Lumetri - Vignette]. Each mode has a set of pre-configured commands. The mapping of the commands can be manually changed in Tangent HUB software if necessary (See Tangent Support website for details).

How to use the control surface with Lumetri

To get to the corresponding grading mode in Premiere Pro, select a section in Lumetri panel. For example, selecting the Wheels section in Lumetri panel maps the control surface hardware to Wheels mode and selecting Creative changes the mode and maps the corresponding wheels and sliders. You can also manually select a mode from the control surface device if the mode was mapped (that is Elements). The Lumetri panel UI then shows the corresponding section if the panel is visible. The last used mode remains active until manually switched to another one.