Tutorial: Adjusting Color and Brightness in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5
When you compress video for the web, the video can darken and colors can become muted. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to correct color and adjust brightness and color saturation with Adobe Premiere Pro's Fast Color Corrector.
Making Color Adjustments in Final Cut Pro 7
Now if you’ve been working in Final Cut Pro, all of this should look pretty familiar. In FCP 7, your Waveform monitor is on the right. You adjust colors the same way using the familiar color wheel on the left (Figure 9, below). You boost brightness in the midtones the same way and you adjust saturation the same way.
Figure 9. Making color adjustments in Final Cut Pro 7
Correcting Color in Final Cut Pro X
On the other hand, if you’re transitioning from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X, you’ll find the tools pretty foreign (Figure 10, below). You’ve got a cramped waveform here that’s kind of psychedelic and a color board instead of a color wheel. Saturation and brightness adjustments are pretty straightforward, though it’s hard to argue that placing all these controls on four separate screens is a huge step forward in interface design.
Figure 10. Color adjustment controls in Final Cut Pro X
A Familiar Color Correction Paradigm
So that’s it. Premiere Pro makes it fast and simple to adjust the color and brightness of your clips so that they look great after compression and if you’re coming over from Final Cut Pro 7, Premiere Pro uses tools and an interface paradigm that should look instantly familiar.
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