How to Adjust Video Color in Adobe Premiere Elements

Adobe Premiere Elements provides extensive tools for adjusting the brightness, contrast, saturation, opacity and hue of a video clip. The tools are easy to use and provide the videographer similar editing tools that photographers are use to using with Adobe Photoshop. This is a clip of a hummingbird feeder that is in shadow under a desert sun. The hummingbirds will essentially be back lit, so it is important to adjust the scene color to be accurate.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 or later running on a MAC or PC Computer
• A copy of a video for experimentation

1. 
   Properties Panel

   First look at the properties panel to the right of the image preview. Click on the tab labeled IMAGE CONTROL to expand the selections. If the IMAGE CONTROL tab is not in the PROPERTIES PANEL, select it from the IMAGE and EFFECTS tab on the left panel and drag the IMAGE CONTROL icon over to the preview window. The Control pane; will now appear under PROPERTIES.

2. 
   Adjust Brightness and Contrast

   Adjust the CONTRAST and BRIGHTNESS. In this case we adjusted the contrast to 80 and the brightness to 5. Make the adjustment by typing in a number. You will notice the changes in the monitor as you make them. This simple adjustment helped the image, but did not change the “red” enough.

3. 
   Selecting the Channel Mixer

   In order to make specific changes to the color, we will need to use the CHANNEL MIXER. This mixer allows you to make changes to specific colors. Adjustments to contrast and color impact all color channels. From the IMAGE and EFFECTS tab on the left panel and drag the CHANNEL MIXER icon over to the preview window. This will open the CHANNEL MIXER in the PROPERTIES PANEL on the right.

4. 
   Mixer Defaults

   Notice the way the defaults are set for the video clip. For each color channel (RGB) you can adjust the primary in relationship to the rest of the primaries as well as the contrast for each channel. You can, for example change the contrast for only the RED channel. The defaults are always set to 100 for red-red, blue-blue and green-green. The contrast is always set to zero even tough we made an overall contrast change under image control properties.

5. 
   Final Corrections

   For the final correction we changed the RED-BLUE to 5.0 and the RED CONTRAST to 8.0. This image shows all the corrections we made to this clip.

6. 
   Final Image

   The final result looks much better. The feeder is now RED as it should be and the hills have the natural reddish brown color of the actual scene along with the California blue sky.

Tips & Warnings

• Make small adjustments. To start over, right click on the item in the PROPERTIES PANEL and click CLEAR.
• Always work with a copy of your scene to maintain your scene archive.

Resources

• Adobe Premiere

[Elitchka]

on 11/29/2007 Thank you for this nice article! It helped me a lot.