How to Color Correct Video Efficiently in Premiere Pro

In this lesson from David Bode’s How to Color Correct Video in Premiere you will learn best practices for working on your footage.

In the video editing process, it makes sense to know when to color correct your footage. If you color correct too early, you may be doing extra work because you may be color correcting video that you’re never going to use or may trim out.

Video Editing Workflow

So, in general your video editing workflow should look something like this:

Import
Organise
Trim your clips
Assemble a rough edit
Refine your edit
Mix audio
Color correct
Color grade
Finalize
Export

These steps are not locked in stone. There’s some fluidity there, but it makes sense to push color correction to one of the last things that you do because, as said, you don’t want to be color correcting footage that you’re not going to use in the edit.

Now, if you find working on clips that are badly in need of color correction too distracting, you can do a little tweaking of certain clips once you’ve assembled a rough edit, but generally, you do want to leave major color correcting until much later.

Right Order for Color Correcting

The basic order of tasks once you are in the color correction mode is:

Exposure
Saturation
White balance/color temperature

The most important thing is to work on the exposure first. Doing a bunch of color modification, and then adjusting the exposure, can lead to problems because once you start pushing the exposure around, you may reveal some more color issues that you need to re-tweak. So it makes sense to set your mid, black and highlight points get them dialed in first then take care of saturation and color temperature.

Optimum Order of Operation in Color Correction

For the optimum order of operations between color correction and color grading, here’s the recommended steps:

Remove artifacts and denoise
Adjust your exposure, i.e. set your blacks, mids, and whites
Adjust saturation
Adjust white balance/color temperature
Re-lighting using power masks, power windows or just regular masks depending on the application
Add gradients, diffusions or lens filter type effects
Add vignettes
Move on to color grading
Add film stock emulation, grain or noise
Resize and sharpen

Now, every clip is not going to need all those processes done, but the general takeaway is that color correction comes before all of that other stuff like noise and grain, color grading, vignettes, diffusion or lens filters, etc.