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[mechanical sounds][SHORT AND SUITE] [On the Road With Jason and Karl] [ADOBE®TV PRESENTS] [Jason Levine] [SHORT AND SUITE] [Karl Soule] [Mechanical sound effects] [SHORT AND SUITE] [On the Road With Jason and Karl] [00:00:00:12] [TRUCK CAM - 8 033] Hello, everyone and welcome to Short and Suite. My name is Jason Levine, Principal Worldwide Evangelist for Adobe's video and audio tools and in this episode, I'm going to give you a look at some basic concepts for using the Secondary Color Corrector, which is part of the 3-way Color Correction Effect inside Premier Pro CS5.5. So let's get started--so what I have here is some footage that I shot in Egypt. And 1 of the primary reasons for using a Secondary Color Corrector is to be able to control specific colors and, typically, this usually falls in the form of skin tones, right? I just want to enhance the skin tones of this video, so let's take a quick look at this. [video with audio running] You can also see that I was using a lens without a fixed aperture there so that's what those little flickers are. In any case, you know that when you shoot with DSLR, there's all kinds of methods and things that you want to implement, when shooting, to really flatten out the picture as much as possible--- to drop the saturation, to drop the sharpness. And it leaves you with an image that looks good but again, a bit flat and it just--it needs some life brought back into it. Now, we can of course, perform an overall grade or an overall correction but if I want to specifically target very specific colored areas, like his face, like the skin tones-- we can use Secondary Color Correction to do that, and that's all done through the 3-Way Color Corrector Effect Again, very intuitive right there, right? It's no wonder why you haven't found it yet. Now, something else to keep in mind: I'm going to show you the basics here. If you want to get more in-depth, you can look at my colleague, Karl Soule's episodes, where he really goes in-depth about how to use these color correction tools, including even Color Finesse and After Effects. So that's also in Short and Suite. I invite you to check those out after you've watched this basic one. So let's start with something real simple--again, just by tackling the skin tones here. So we will start, simply by beginning with the Fast Color Corrector because I want to adjust some of the input levels here, on this clip. So I'm going to drag and drop it on there. Let's wind back down, come over here and just make a slight adjustment here-- like so again, readjusting my input black level, okay? Just like that and again, we can turn this on or off--see the change that I made, again, really subtle, really basic. And at this point, now I'm ready to begin adding the 3-Way Color Corrector, and tackle the skin tones. So we'll come over to Effects, type "3"; drop the 3-Way Color Corrector on there. Let's twirl up Fast Color Corrector. And, right from the start--if you've never used the 3-Way Color Corrector, it can be a bit daunting and a bit scary because, as we twirl down, you'll see lots of parameters again--a lot of familiar UI elements, but there's so much going on here. The problem is, in terms of Secondary Color Correction--where is it? I don't see it. Well, it's all the way at the bottom. So to begin the process of leveraging Secondary Color Correction, first let's twirl this down, come back up here; and under Output, we're going to go into Mask mode. Choose Mask mode, twirl back down, and now we're going to grab our Eyedropper. And what we need to do is take a sample of the color that we're trying to affect or process. So I'll come over to his face here, make a single sample--like this, and right away, now, anything that you see in white-- that's the area that will be affected by the color corrector. So naturally, we need to take additional samples. So we'll go into our Additive Eyedropper here, take a couple more samples--like this; come over to his neck over here, we make some more like that, a couple more samples. Okay--maybe 1 more on his cheek up here in the highlighted areas. All right--and that's starting to look pretty good. Again, maybe 1 more on his nose right there--like that. Perfect. Now people often ask me, at this point, "Okay, great--so this is kind of like using the Mask and Adjustments panel in Photoshop." Yes, it is--but this isn't static. How do you know? Well, we can play it back. So take a look: [video and audio playing] Right? So it's actually following all of the like-colored pixels, based on those color selections that I made--it's real simple. And we're only going to be affecting those white regions, right? Everything in black--not affected by the color corrector. So now, we go back up here. Let's twirl this back down under Output and choose Composite. Now, again--you can learn more about this in Karl's series, where you actually affect Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows individually. For me, just to kind of get started and to showcase the ease of using this feature, let's, under Tonal Range, select Master. And we know that we want to try and bring out more of those--again--natural skin tones. Or if you're going for that sort of Hollywood cinematic look, you want to bring out the orange, right?. The orange and the teal--well, you can do that very simply. Typically, I will start by increasing Master Saturation. And I'm just going to start pulling the balance in hue here towards those orange skin tones. Now, you can go really extreme--like this, and dial it back a bit, okay? And again, would you typically increase Master Saturation to 125? Not necessarily, so you can play with this; and this is truly seasoned to taste--again, the more and more you increase, you're going to start looking a bit more nuclear. That's entirely up to you. The idea is that what once looked like this--very flat, very pale-- now looks like that. You'll also notice, under 3-Way Color Corrector and Fast Corrector, the 32 icons and this additional little Accelerated Effect icon. That's because these are not only 32-bit floating point color effects, they're also GPU accelerated. So if you have 1 of our many NVIDIA GPU supported cards, to be used with the Mercury Playback Engine, these Effects are accelerated, which of course means that you can play them back, in Real-Time, like this. [video with audio playback] Okay? So, very simply, let's do a little graded side by side this-- I love doing side by side comparisons. Let's go Full Screen on this. On the left, you'll see the original and on the right, you'll see my finished version. I've added a little vignette and I've also brought back some of those teal blue hues. Take a look. [video with audio running] Okay. Real simple--and again-- something that, if you just didn't know where to find it, you'd be looking a long time. There's no specific secondary setting in the Effects menu. You have to find it inside the 3-Way Color Corrector. Now, where this also becomes really useful is when you're trying to correct different areas, right?-- different colored sections of a video. In this case, this is some footage I've actually shot out of the window of a plane. So if we take a quick look at this-- [video with audio playing] Very exciting, right? Not much going on here; you can actually see some smudges on the windows of the plane--planes are filthy. They don't clean them enough. So this is--this is a problem for me, but nonetheless-- what you can see, of course, is that it's very blown out, right? Why? Because we're in the clouds; we're in the sky, it's very bright. And we actually have some brown earth down there; we have some green trees-- but you can't really see it--it all just sort of looks blue and white, right? But I want to affect each of those different colored ranges, independently. And I'm not a colorist--I just know that I want to bring this back to life. I want to use this in something. I want people to see what I shot out of the plane-- to allow them to experience it the way that I actually saw it. So to do that, we're going to start again with the Fast Color Corrector, by first readjusting the white balance and the black levels. So I can come up to Fast Color, drag it on this clip; and first I'll choose my White Balance Eyedropper. Now when I click on this, you're not going to see a radical change. It looks like it goes a bit more blue--let's go up to the black level here. And I happen to know that, in the shadow of the clouds here-- these appear, to me, to be almost entirely black. So when I click on this, right away--let's go Full Screen--it already looks better, right? It's a bit dark, but it already looks better. And we can bring those levels up a bit But what you can actually see now are the differences in color. You've got very rich, white clouds; clearly got some brown earth down here and some greenery, okay? So now we want to begin tackling those individual ranges-- those individual color ranges. So this is where we're, once again, going to use Secondary Color Correction. Let's come over here--again, we're going to use the 3-Way Color Corrector for this-- drag it on here, go into Mask Mode; twirl down to the bottom, Secondary Color Correction; grab our Eyedropper, and now we're going to focus on areas of the brown earth. So let's make 1 selection here, okay? And already, you can see--again--all the areas in white--those are the areas that will be affected by the color corrector. Let's do a couple more sections here, okay? And that looks pretty good, right? That's the area that we're focused on. So again, I can twirl this back up--and you can also add or subtract selections. You'll notice you've got a Plus icon next to 1 eyedropper, and a Minus. You already know this stuff from Photoshop. Go back up to Composite. Now again--typically here, I'd probably start working on Midtones and Shadows. Just for the sake of time, let's go to our Master. I always begin by increasing first, and just like with the skin tones, I'm going to pull this towards the orange, earthy tones here--and again-- you can very easily go extreme, right? That doesn't look good, nor realistic.[laughing] But you get the idea--and again, we're only affecting those color ranges! So you can turn them into anything--that's the key, right? It doesn't have to be perfect, it can be artsy. Very simply, the point is--now you know how to do this very easily--all right. So here we go--we've got some brown earth . That looks about right. Let's go ahead and drop this down just a bit. And now we're going to focus on the green, right? So we can twirl this up. Let's add another instance of the color corrector--like this, okay? Down to Mask Mode, twirl down, Secondary Color Correction, grab our Eyedropper, and now we want to find some specifically green areas-- and in a single click--look at that; there's a lot of green to work with there. Now, again--we can take more samples, as necessary. To my eyes, that looks pretty--pretty good. I think we got most of it in that single click there. So let's go back up to Composite, twirl down, Tonal Range; Master, increase Master Saturation, okay? Come over here, and let's go to the green. Go to the Green. [laughing] All right--something like that--okay. Now again, it looks a little bizarre now because what we have is a bit of what you might call hot and cold, right? So there's no warmth to this at all. You've got extreme white, extreme black, extreme brownish earth, extreme green and sort of a gradient blue at the top. So we want to warm this thing over. We want to do a general--a general grade--over top of everything. So this is where I could either use the 3-Way Color Corrector again or something like Color Finesse and, again-- if you want to learn more about this; you want to about the depth of these features, you can check out Karl's versions of these Effects. Or I can go back to the Fast Color Corrector, which also is accelerated in 32-bit, as mentioned; drag it on here now. And now we're just going to do an overall grade--just to warm everything up. Now remember, I was flying in the sunlight so I might actually pull this-- let's go ahead and increase the saturation-- pull this towards the sort of yellow, sunny hues. Again, we're just going to warm everything up a bit--just a bit. Now again, if we wanted to go a bit more cinematic, we could go back over towards the teals. Let's go to something like this--just like that; drop it down a bit, and there you have it, okay? So now, once again, we can choose our Playback Resolution. Now I think, on this particular machine-- because we happen to have a Quadro card in here-- I believe it's a 4000 card-- we should be able to handle 4 32-bit floating point Effects on 1080p footage in Real-Time. Should we go for it? Yes. Okay, perfect--let's go for it. Full quality, full resolution, hit Play--like this-- Full Screen it--you can see the smudges on the window. Now you have some nice gradient sky there. You can also see that, clearly the pilot was on approach, landing-- or maybe tossed back a few, I don't know--just kidding. In any case, you'll also see something else, which is very interesting here. And I don't want to start any conspiracy theories, but you may notice there's some kind of flying object--right here. Could be a plane, could be something else. I don't know--I'm not here to judge. I'm just here to show you how these features work. And that, my friends, is a very basic primer on Leveraging Secondary Color Correction inside the 3-Way Color Corrector. For Short and Suite, my name is Jason Levine. We'll see you next time. [00:00:01:05] [TRUCK CAM - 8 033] [00:00:02:01] [mechanical sounds] [Executive Producer] [Bob Donlon] [Producer] [Karl Miller] [Director] [Kush Amerasinghe] [Post-Production] [Erik Espera] [ADOBe® TV PRODUCTIONS] [tv.adobe.com]