How To Use The Premiere Pro Title Tool To Color Correct with Shapes

Day 12: 20 Insights in 20 Days Holiday Marathon

How to Color Correct Using the Premiere Pro Title Tool

I’m a big fan of Adobe Premiere Pro, I’ve been using for years, and I’m a certified Master Trainer for the application. While in general, I love the color correction and grading tools in Premiere there is one big weakness with the toolset – the ability to easily create a shape, window, vignette (or what ever else you want to call them!) natively.

Sure, you can use 3rd party plugins to give you windows, but there has to be some way to create a window easily in Premiere Pro right?

The Title Tool?

Yes, thats right!  You can use the Premiere Pro Title Tool to:

• Create a shape…
• Fill that shape to create a matte…
• Then use that as a matte to create a secondary correction

Phew...

I know, its more steps than I’d like, too. Especially considering how easy it is to create windows in dedicated color grading tools. But if you spend the majority of your time working in Premiere the technique I’ll show in this Insight is a valuable one to add to your bag of tricks – at least until the Premiere Pro team adds masking/window controls to the standard color correction effects!

And it’s not just for sky grades or vignettes and you can animate it too!

In this Insight I’ll be grading a sky in a shot to make it more stylized, but its important that you know this technique can also be used in other situations that you’d apply shapes or windows to – like people.  Also – you can also easily invert (or reverse) the matte you create, giving you inside/outside control of your correction.

The shot I’m working on is static and in this Insight I don’t show animating a matte. However, with a little time and some keyframes that’s possible.  I’ll show you how that works in a later Insight.  

A big thanks to fellow Adobe Premiere Pro Master Trainer Jarle Leirpoll for first showing me a version of this technique years ago – I continue to use it all the time!  Also check out Jarle’s amazingly useful site on Premiere Pro Techniques

Questions? Comments? Use the comments below to start a discussion on this Insight. Or ask a question if something I did confused you.

– Robbie