In this Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to quickly and precisely color grade your footage and movies by exporting custom color lookup tables from Photoshop. This technique is particularly useful if you are comfortable working with Photoshop and the adjustment layers and color tools in Photoshop but haven’t yet wrapped your mind entirely around the Lumetri tools in Premiere. You can export your looks from Photoshop and have them adjusting your footage in Premiere in LITERALLY SECONDS! You’re going to love this tutorial if you’ve been looking to take the next step with the color in your videos!
How This Works + Exporting a Still Frame (the easy way)
The way this process works is we export out a single frame from our video and bring it over to Photoshop where we will create a cinematic color look and then save that as a Color LUT. The first step is to move our playhead to a frame we like in our Premiere editing file and use the hotkey Shift + E to export a frame and choose to save the frame as a JPEG file.
Creating the Color Grade + Exporting the Color Lookup Table
Open that JPEG image in Photoshop and use Adjustment layers (Important to use Adjustment layers!) to create an effect that you like. Select all the Adjustment layers that make up the effect and go File>Export>Color Lookup Tables and save out a 3DL file set to the 64 High quality.
Applying the LUT in Premiere Pro
Over in Premiere Pro, open the Color workspace by going Window>Workspaces>Color. Over to the right in the Lumetri panel click the “Creative” tab and hit the “Look” drop down menu and choose “Browse” and find your LUT file on your hard drive. Use the Intensity slider to get the exact look you want and that’s it! Watch the full 6 minute video at the top of this post to see all of what I did and exactly how I created my look.
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