How to Color Grade a Rich Contrast Sunset in premiere pro

Published on July 21, 2017

Premiere Pro Tutorials

Color Grading, premiere pro, Summer Sunset

With Jordy still on vacation, he is taking gorgeous shots from Normandy, France. And what are vacation movies without a beautiful sunset. So in this tutorial we kept the summer vibe going and we explain how you can color-grade your sunsets in a cinematic and professional way. We use the Lumetri panel and mask in Premiere Pro, to give that something extra to your scene and make it pop out.

Color-grading your footage is something that needs to be done. You can of course film in a picture profile like vivid, which makes your colors more pop. But this will make your post production much harder, because matching your shots will be very difficult. That’s why we prefer to shoot as flat as possible. For our Panasonic GH4 & GH5, it’s called V-log. But if you have a Sony or a Canon, it will be S-log or C-log. These Log profiles will desaturated you image, making it perfect for color grading it in post production. With flat and desaturated footage you have full control over what you want to to with the colors. It almost comes near to the amount off possibilities you have with raw.

Something that can help you will grading your footage are the scopes. When working on a simple laptop or pc, you’ll probably don’t have a calibrated screen. This means that the colors you’re seeing on your screen can differ from the colors I’m seeing on my screen. To fix this problem you can always calibrate your screen like we showed in a previous video or buy a calibrated one. But the cheapest way to get realistic colors is by using the scopes and waveforms.

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