In this second lesson on colour theory, our focus was on LUTs, which change the way the colours of a video look. They are colour grade presets and can make flat colours looks much sharper, stand out and increase contrast. We also learned of a website called Gumroad where people make Lut packs and market them. I think it’s great that there is a website where you can buy and sell lookup tables (which is what Lut stands for).
We grabbed a simple Halloween clip off of Pixabay and imported it into Premiere. Right after that, in order to make the Lut, we had to move a snapshot from the clip into Photoshop for editing. This was done by clicking on the camera icon, export frame and then naming and saving the png which is imported into Photoshop straight after. I had some difficulties with Pixabay this time; for some reason, the format of almost all of the videos I picked wasn’t compatible with Premier, which has never happened before. Due to this, the video I picked wasn’t great for this task – it was very low key and didn’t have much colour I could work with. At least it was quite creepy and I could use that and exaggerate it with colour grading. I decided to save one of the final frames of the clip as a png because the climax is when the door is fully open and the most colour is seen. Once the png was in photoshop, I made sure it was selected and then clicked layer, new, background form layer. What this did was create an adjustment layer, which keeps the original image intact, but allows you to edit on a copied version. I then selected the little circle at the bottom of the right panel and that’s where I got total creative freedom and played around with the settings of the image. I changed the highlights and shadows, making them either greenish or purple, and increased the contrast, as examples. My aim was to make the person watching feel unsettled and uncomfortable and I think that my colour scheme works well in combination with the extreme darks and lights.
After I felt that I was finished with my Lut, I clicked on the first adjustment layer, held shift, and clicked the last one, so that they were all selected, after which I went to file, export, colour lookup tables. After naming my Lut ‘Sickly Green’ and saving the location, I was finally ready to return to the clip and apply what I created. In Premiere, I went into effects (at the top of the footage display) and clicked on video effects, colour correction, where I dragged Lumetri to the video. Then, in the box to the left, I could see that source was underlined, and I changed that to effect controls so that I could add my Lut. This was done by expanding creative, setting the look to none and clicking browse, to find the one that I made. I chose the 3DL version to add-in, and that was it! My Lut was officially added to the clip and I was surprised at the fact that I had only edited one frame form the clip, but the effect was added throughout the whole clip. I think my editing really made a difference and I quite enjoyed being able to change the atmosphere of the clip. Here is the before and after:
