Welcome to my final blog entry on the Movember web-series and as promised in this final instalment we’ll take a look at how I did some advanced grading on the web-series in Adobe Premiere without the use of any third party plug-ins or add-on filters.

Below is a file I created in Photoshop which features six distinct layers each containing a unique gradient which can be independently selected or combined with others once inside Adobe Premiere. Once you bring a layer in Premiere you can rotate it, stretch it and adjust it’s opacity to meet a wide range of use on your video.

To download a copy of this PSD file and try it on your own projects simply click on the image below! By the way you don’t need Photoshop, the PSD file will directly import to Adobe Premiere and most other NLE software. When you import it however be sure to import all the layers individually, and not merged.

So below is an original frame from the series without any color correction or grading added to it. This is a pivotal moment in the episode where the evil boss is being confronted by the leader of the League of Extraordinary Moustaches. To really draw the audience into the center of the frame where the action is taking place it would help to increase the contrast betweet the center and some of the brighter areas of the frame. In particular on the left we have the actor in the foreground who’s shirt is a little bright and the sky in the background is also quite distracting. This scene is a perfect candidate to have some grads applied to it… in post.

To darken the shirt on the actor in the foreground I drag a horizontal left edged grad from my PSD file to my Adobe Premiere timeline. By setting the anchor point to the left edge it allows me to rotate the grad slightly to match the angle of the shirt edge, and also stretch the grad depending on how much of the image I want to cover. Here’s what it looks like against a white background:

Below is what it looks like layered overtop of the video. At 100% opacity it’s too dark and needs to be lightened using the opacity setting.

After lowering the opacity to 20% the highlights from the shirt are reduced and already the center of the image is becoming more predominant.

Two more grads are applied and their opacity adjusted: a flat edged grad on the top of the frame and a rounded corner grad on the bottom.

After the final color correction and adjustments to the RGB curves are made at last we have our final look:

There are indeed several ways to achieve the same effect of applying post production grads to images and this method is neither the best or worst. For this specific project the benefit of this method was that all color correction and grading were completely self-contained within a single project file which made it easy to send the project file back to the producer without having to include a new set of separate corrected video files.

That wraps up the series of blog entries on the 2012 Movember web-series videos and I hope you enjoyed the web-series and insights behind the scenes of the production. I’d love to hear your comments or questions so please feel free to post.