SpeedGrade Tutorial – Quick Primaries

There is an order of operations that makes primary grade in SpeedGrade relatively easy. Here’s a short tutorial showing it:

And to recap:

  1. Use Contrast and Pivot to get your green channel into the proper range
  2. Use Offset to level the black point
  3. Use Temperature to line up the red and blue white point
  4. Use Magenta to line up the green white point
  5. Adjust Gain to taste
  6. Adjust Gamma for contrast and midtone color cast
  7. Tweak the Final Saturation to taste.

This way you avoid issues of various adjustments influencing one another, especially if you attempt to manipulate both Gain level, and color controls, or try to touch the Offset after you’ve established your white point.

Tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

16 Responses to SpeedGrade Tutorial – Quick Primaries

  1. Christiaan says:

    How would you suggest doing this primary grade with tools in PPCS6?
    Use of these three plugins?

    ProcAmp
    CI Temprerature
    Fast Colorcorrector

    Or do you suggest another way?

    • BartW says:

      In Premiere there is no overlap between various controls, the way you have it in SpeedGrade, so the order of operations does not matter that much. I suggest you use Fast Color Corrector, RGB Curves or ProcAmp to get your white and black points into the legal range, and then proceed from there. Myself I usually resort to FCC and RGB Curves.

  2. David Arbor says:

    Excellent tutorial, Bart! I’m printing out this list and hanging it next to my machine.

  3. abid jan says:

    Overall very impressive work indeed. Great contribution. The kind of effects i was expecting from adobe for quite some time.
    Thanks
    Jan

  4. MtD says:

    Bart –
    This was just what I needed! I’m an editor that is being dragged into having to do my own color correction, this was an very valuable start for me. Thanks for this and your other work – they have been a big help.

    • BartW says:

      Glad to be able to help.

      • MtD says:

        Question –
        I have a sequence In Premiere Pro CC that I have used your tutorial to color correct in Speedgrade using “Direct Link to Speedgrade . . .” . Now I want to take the color corrected sequence into After Effects to do some effects. When I use “Adobe Dynamic Link > Replace With After Effects Composition” the clips appear in AE without the Lumetri effects. What is the proper way to do this?
        Thanks
        MtD

  5. BartW says:

    After Effects does not support the full Lumetri effect (hopefully yet?). If you want to use the grade in AE, you need to save the .look file, and use Apply Color LUT effect to read and apply it. Note, that the keyframing, secondaries, fx layers and masks will not be transfered to AE this way.

    • MtD says:

      OK, thanks again, that works. I noticed the secondaires, etc. did not get stored in the .look file – which kind of forces the older workflow of exporting a graded clip and using that file in AE. Hope we’ll get a “Direct Link to After Effects” at some point in time.

      Thanks for the help!
      MtD

  6. Bart A. says:

    Such a great help. Thanks Bart

  7. Pingback: Make The Most of The New Features in Adobe Speedgrade | Premiumbeat.com

  8. zendojas says:

    This is one of the best plugins for matching cameras in Premiere Pro- saved me a heap of time. Thank you.

  9. Florian says:

    This tutorial is great!
    Since CG and Premiere no longer work together – would it be possible to recreate this workflow within Premiere only (Lumetri effect). Thanks alot!

    • BartW says:

      Thanks. I might, though with Lumetri panel there are multiple ways to achieve the same result.

Leave a Reply to zendojas Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.