Getting the proper white balance of your clips should always be taken into account as it’s an essential initial step of every professional color grading workflow. Fortunately, Adobe has made this process extremely easy and straightforward for those editors using Premiere Pro CC 2017 as their primary NLE of choice.
The quick AdobeMasters video tutorial below showcases how to correct the white balance of your clips and neutralize them for later color grading. It’s neither revolutionary, nor groundbreaking technique by any means, but it’ll certainly do the trick on most occasions, especially when you’re in a pinch.
With the latest enhancements to the Lumetri Color panel, Adobe allows editors to be more creative and flexible when manipulating colors than ever before. For example, by using HSL Secondaries, you can easily select a specific range of colors to make adjustments to. Premiere Pro also now offers color grading control surface support, which gives you finer overall control over the subtleties of the color grade than what can be achieved with a mouse and keyboard.
An integrated part of those enhancements are the White Balance settings in the Lumetri color panel covered in the above video. In essence, these allow you to set the white balance within the frame with a single click. Just select the White Balance eyedropper and click to sample an area in the Program Monitor.
If you’d like to make the white balance as efficient and accurate as possible, you should pick a portion of your image that contains pure white or gray color. You can adjust the white balance further by changing the Temperature and Tint properties by using the slider controls to fine-tune the values accordingly.
Additionally, by hitting and holding Ctrl while using the White Balance eyedropper, you’ll be able to select a larger portion of the image that contains more pixels which eventually should make the process even more accurate and precise. Furthermore, you can experiment with different portions of your image and compare the different outcomes.
In case you want to get the best results, simply use a professional color checker passport or color chart. Even a white piece of paper should do the trick. As long as you include a frame of this useful tools in every setup you’re about to shoot, you’ll be good to go.
[source: AdobeMasters]
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This is off course the same across all adobe applications. But for the life of me I will never understand why dedicated color grading application like DaVinci Resolve does not have it or something like it. It is painfully missed, unless off course I am missing some hidden feature myself.