Color Grading with downloaded LUTs in Premiere Pro

Hey everyone, we are jumping back into Luts and Looks. To recap it and to show you how we can use it, to blend in some footage, the one we have, that's not really part of this whole scene, plus lots of these bits of footage. They're all shot at different times of the day. So we want to add a bit of consistency. So that's before, that's after. We'll look at some free ones and we'll look at some paid options for Luts. Look up tables, let's get in there. 

So great use of our Lut or Look, is to try and blend in, like this B-roll that didn't come from the same scene, and to be honest, like the whole thing is a bit-- the lighting changed quite dramatically throughout the day while they were filming. So there's a lot of bits that we need to kind of stitch together, to try and add consistency, because we're kind of starting with the sun setting, and then, jumping to when it's kind of a lot earlier in the day. 

So a Lut's going to fix that. Let's do a couple of things. I want to show you a little shortcut, oh, not a shortcut, a tip. Watch this, if I make it bigger nothing really happens, but watch when I make it a bit bigger, oh, a little bit bigger, you can see the thumbnails appear. That can be really handy when you are just trying to jump through the Timeline and just work out where you're at, because I keep forgetting where the clouds are; so there it is. 

The other thing we're going to do is, we're going to apply our Lut to an Adjustment Layer, because we are good like that, you have to cut that bit up. So we do it, click on the little-- make sure you're on your Project Window. Go to the turned up page, we're going to make a new Adjustment Layer. We're going to click 'OK'. We're going to leave it, called Adjustment Layer. I'm going to apply this over the top and stretch it out. Now you'll find, working with Adjustment Layers, when I move my arrow, can you see, it actually selects the next thing underneath it. So you got to be very specific and select your Adjustment Layer, otherwise it's not going to work. 

We'll do it to this first bit just to see it. So with Adjustment Layer selected, we're going to install our Lut. You can do it, the official way is under 'Basic Correction', you install it here, click 'Browse'. I like to install it under 'Creative', and put it with the Looks, they're the same thing. The difference here is I can play with the intensity, which I like. So I'm going to go into here, I'm going to click 'Browse', and I've downloaded some for us, so just went to the internet, went, "free instagram luts." I know I use that word free too much, I'll talk about a paid one at the end, but let's have a look, under 'Parkour', let's look under 'Graphics', and pick one of them, and click 'Open'. 

You kind of see it applied there, I can play around, it's called Hefe, I can lower it down, raise it up. You don't see it in the thumbnail, if you're wondering why, it's because Luts aren't meant to go in here really, they work just fine though. So you can decide on how much you want, and because it's covering everything, everything should get this kind of consistency across it all to tie it all together, which is really nice. It's probably a little bit high, I'll go back to the 100 that it was set at, seems to look nice. 

One thing to note about Luts and Looks is you can only have one in it at a time, which is really weird. So if I want to go through and pick a different one, I have to kick Hefe, and put in Hudson. So it's kind of one loads at a time, you can see, Hefe's gone, which is a real big pain. This might be-- in the future this is a request that a lot of people have asked Premiere Pro for, and there is a way of kind of putting in more than one, there's a bit of a hack but it's way too hacky, like mixing with the code, but they might actually just turn into a feature in the future, which I believe they probably will. 

I'm going to go back to Hefe because I liked it. The other thing to note is that Hefe will only be around for this project. If I save and close it and open up a different project, it's not going to have Hefe in there. There is another hack to kind of make it persistent through all projects, but again, hopefully just be a feature that Premiere Pro releases soon. 

Now in terms of paid Luts and Looks, you are going to find a lot more Luts around because it's more generic. Goes into lots of different programs, not just Premiere Pro, whereas the Looks, which is essentially the same thing, but the word that Premiere Pro uses, it's more specific for Premiere Pro. You can look at things like elements as part of their subscription, they've got lots of Luts. Luts, and Travel maker Luts. 

The cool thing about having something like this is you can click on them, and kind of preview them, and watch the little video generally, This one doesn't have a little video, kind of has them over here, you can kind of see, rather than having to load them all in, go to Browse and load them all in, you can kind of get a sense of what you might use. 

Another place you'll find Luts is, often videographers, famous people on YouTube that talk about film, they will have their own Luts, like this guy here, Peter McKinnon, we talked about him earlier, I've made a link for you at bringyourownlaptop.com/peter, and no referrals or anything here, just, I like, his style, and I like his Lut pack. It was 15 bucks, I use it a bit. The big thing to remember though, with these Luts, from anybody, is that they will make a good footage great, but if you've got bad footage it's going to make it less bad, but it's not going to bump it up to great. So it depends on what you're starting with, depending on the effects of some of these. 

If you do go visit Peter, let him know that I sent you because, mainly because I'm a fan boy, and I want to do something with him professionally one day. I'm not sure why I added professionally, what else I'm going to do with him, maybe I'll give him a kiss, just on the cheek though. Anyway let's look at what we've used our Lut for. We've used it here to add a bit of consistency, across all the different shooting times, and because we've mixed up the time, we've put stuff before, this was shot at the end of the day, this was shot obviously earlier in the day, we can tie it all together, plus our random clouds fit in there a bit better. 

One last thing, I can't help myself, let's click on the 'Adjustment Layer', don't judge me, let's go to 'Vignette'. This also ties together the different screens, our different shots, because, you can see I’ve added a black border on the outside to this, and to this, and also out of just interest you might notice that it affects the dark parts a lot more than the light parts. Have a look at, see this one here, you can't really see the vignette on the white stuff, but it affects it quite heavily on the darker parts, it's just part of the vignette. And I'm going to pretend like it adds consistency across them all, but really I just want to do vignette. 

All right, that's enough, oh, one last thing, lots of last things. If you can do the effects on and off, to see where we ended up, because we've done stuff with vignette and creative, and basic and color correction, potentially, you can't-- you can turn them on, all individually on and off, but it's often easy just click on the 'Effects' button, and it will turn everything that you've done in here off. All right, now that's completely it. Kids don't do vignette; see you in the next video.