Another day, another insightful tutorial from Casey Faris. This time seasoned colorist explores an enticing color grading workflow with the Lumetri color panel inside Premiere Pro CC that might not necessarily help you to optimize your render times when using the popular NLE but will certainly improve your overall color grading workflow, especially when you need to do more advanced stuff on the fly.
In particular, you’ll learn why stacking multiple corrections might be the better option instead of doing all your corrections in the Lumetri color panel at once thus working smarter while doing some advanced color grading in Premiere CC 2015.3.
Just like you would normally use nodes in DaVinci Resolve or layers in Photoshop CC, you can apply a similar approach in the Premiere Pro CC as well. The main reason for doing so is very simple indeed. That way you’ll be able to swap the position of the applied filters and put them in a certain order.
As a result, your creative options should expand significantly. Another reason is that by following this technique, you can quickly affect only a particular area of your image, which also gives you more freedom and flexibility than just making all your adjustments while utilizing only one Lumetri Color effect.
Once you apply the Lumetri Color filter to your footage, and you do your primary corrections, duplicate the effect by selecting it and then using the Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V combination on your keyboard. That action will copy the filter that you’ve already applied to your footage.
Then you can quickly reset and rename the newly created effect by pressing the Reset Effect button on the side. Now, you can add a contrast curve, pull a secondary, apply a LUT, make further adjustments or add a vignette on top by using a separate filter for each modification.
In case you want to change the order of these effects later, you can do it instantly as the possibilities are virtually limitless. In some cases the order in which you do all color grading tweaks can make a big difference, so if you want to save some time and effort while color grading stacking multiple corrections might be a feasible option worth trying.
According to some people, though, you might lose color information by using this workflow as Premiere Pro algorithms are not optimized for this type of advanced color processing like other platforms such as Resolve and Nuke, but you still might try this approach and see how it would work for yourself.
[source: Casey Faris]
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Not only is it not optimised to pass high-quality colour through to the next effect in the chain, but it can slow down Premiere an insane amount.
DaVinci Resolve is far more intuitive with node-based color grading, PLUS it maintains high-quality 32-bit color science. Lastly, the render speeds are nearly 2-3 x faster than Premiere, even with “high-quality” color.
For what it’s worth, thanks for making the video. It’s pretty cool and that’s not easy, right? Peace!