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In this fifth part of our Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 tutorial series, let's learn how to use another new filter included with this nonlinear editing software, this one offering an easy way to automatically color correct a shot or group of shots. And we'll also use a Photoshop graphic as a Track Matte in Premiere Pro, and see how well the two Adobe applications are able to work together.
Another new work-saver included in the Premiere Pro 1.5 package comes to us via the Photoshop team at Adobe, who have been diligently developing lots of great color controls over the years. This filter is called Auto Color, and like its companions Auto Contrast, Auto Levels and Shadow & Highlight, if you're in a hurry it can do a lot of great things for you automatically. All you have to do is drag that filter from the project window onto the clip you'd like to correct on the timeline, and it's done. If you're a novice, that could be all the color correction you'll ever need, and if you're a color correction guru, it couldn't hurt to see if it can fix a shot before you spend a lot of time tweaking it manually. Try it. I think it's remarkable how its algorithms many times can match exactly the fix I had in mind.
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| [Click graphic for enlarrgement] If Premiere Pro 1.5's new Auto Color filter is too automatic for you, its controls allow you to change the black levels, white levels, gamma and more. |
If the color correction it chooses for you isn't quite right, you can still open its disclosure triangle in the Effect Controls window and tweak the whites, blacks and gamma (see graphic above). The feature I've found the most useful is temporal smoothing (on my screen it reads "Temporal Sm"), which you'll see if you click its disclosure triangle in the Effect Controls window. If you have a series of clips combined into a virtual clip on the timeline that you'd like to color correct, then drop the Auto Color filter on that virtual clip and it will correct all those clips at the same time, with temporal smoothing calculating a happy medium for all. For a longer shot that has lots of different lighting scenes, you'll want to click on the Scene Detect check box. Then, Premiere Pro can sense scene changes and adjust its color correction accordingly, its algorithm intelligent enough to look for breaks in the scene over time. Sometimes it doesn't do much with just one shot that's consistent throughout, but it's more useful if the camera's panning around and there are lots of changes in color and lighting. What works at the beginning of such a clip might not work at the end, and that's where this scene detection can be a big help. Keep in mind, though, that you'll notice your computer groaning under the strain of this temporal smoothing, with the controls becoming more sluggish as you add more filtering, because it has to do a lot of math to accomplish this. This also translates into greatly increased render times. Even so, using the Auto Color filter is a nice way to do lots of color correcting without a lot of time-consuming fiddling.
Next we'll see how Premiere Pro 1.5 interacts with another ubiquitous application, Photoshop. Now if you don't have Photoshop, you might want to follow along anyway, just to see how well it interacts with Premiere Pro. And, if you're not yet conversant in Photoshop, you might want to seriously consider becoming so, because knowing Photoshop can pay off significantly in your production work. It allows you to create highly refined full-screen graphics, title sequences and lots more, and even can help you rotoscope artwork if you're so inclined.
For this exercise, we'll do an advanced technique in Premiere Pro 1.5 that depends on Photoshop: Creating and using a track matte. Start by placing one clip on the Video 1 track of the timeline, and another just above it, on the Video 2 track. The in the File menu, select New and then Photoshop File. It will first ask you to name that file, and then will save it (I saved mine on the desktop to make it easier to find later). It will then automatically open Photoshop for you with a graphic sized to your project -- in the case of our DV project, 720x480 -- complete with title- and action-safe guides to keep you from getting out of bounds with your graphic. Here's some new coolness, too: With the new version, Photoshop CS, graphics are now created in non-square pixels, so when you make a circle in Photoshop it doesn't turn into an ellipse in Premiere. If you're using a previous versions of Photoshop (version 7.0 or earlier), you'll still have to squeeze your graphics horizontally a bit as you've always had to do to get them to look right. But for this exercise, there won't be any squeezing necessary either way.
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