Colour in Premiere Pro: The Lumetri Panel as Stacked Layers, Scopes, Curves Over Sliders, Installing LUTs Into the App Package, the HLG Rec.709 Override, Effect Controls Masks and Tracking, HSL Secondary, Wheels, HSL Curves, and the Fifty-Minute Idaho Grade

Window > Workspaces > Color. Lumetri Color on the right: Basic Correction (white-balance dropper, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Input LUT), Creative (Look), Curves (RGB, HSL), Color Wheels & Match, HSL Secondary, Vignette, Settings. Highlights/Shadows recover with less contrast loss; Whites/Blacks hit the whole image. Grade the timeline clip, not the source (the toggle at the top). Multiple instances: add, rename, select, reset from the panel's top controls - they stack like layers and reorder in Effect Controls; a large white-balance fix goes on a second instance placed BEFORE the log-correction/LUT instance because correcting after the LUT distorts colours; a sky mask instance can sit before a heavy-contrast instance so it reads less-clipped data. Left side: Source viewer, Lumetri Scopes, Effect Controls (masks, Motion).

Lumetri Scopes (Window > Lumetri Scopes; the wrench picks which): Parade - R, G, B in columns, dark at the bottom, left-to-right position kept; Waveform - the parade superimposed, the one used most, clipping when data touches top or bottom, the top colour is the dominant one; Vectorscope - hue and saturation only, centre desaturated, primaries round the ring, a skin-tone line rarely useful for drones, best for creative grading and matching two shots. Basic Correction: Exposure flattens, so Curves instead; for extreme corrections do the whole log correction by hand in Curves rather than LUT-then-fix; Temperature and Tint for white balance; Contrast alone crushes - Curves whites toward 100 on the waveform plus a little Contrast and Shadows. RGB Curves: up-left brightens, down-right darkens; double-click to reset; anchor points flanking a range to isolate it; S-curve for contrast with more dynamic range; the channel dots for per-channel R/G/B white-balance rescue. 'Get it right when you're out shooting.'

'A color grading preset that gives you a look or does something to your shot with one click.' Input/technical LUTs correct flat log; creative LUTs impose a look. The free Flying Filmmaker LUT Pack (download icon on the lesson; more free and paid links below it) unzips to Creative and Utility/Technical folders. Mac: Applications > Premiere Pro > Show Package Contents > Contents > Lumetri > LUTs > Technical / Creative, copy each set in (password prompt), quit and restart. Input LUTs under Basic Correction > Input LUT: Air 2S Color Display Assist (and + Saturation) for Air 2S D-Log M, Air 2S D-Log Color Transformation ('built off the Color Space Transform in DaVinci Resolve', fairly aggressive), and the generic HDR Log Correction that works across DJI logs and even HLG-to-Rec.709. Creative LUTs under Creative > Look with the intensity slider - default 100, often ~20 % for strong looks. Creative's other tools (Vibrance, Saturation, tints, Faded Film) he rarely uses.

If the first clip in a sequence is HLG, Premiere may set the sequence to Rec.2100 HLG - wrong for YouTube and Instagram. Lumetri > Settings > Sequence > Working Color Space > Rec.709. Per clip: Settings > Source Clip > Override Media Color Space - Rec.709 for a flatter, easier start, or Rec.2020 for 'a bit more saturated colors but we don't have the weird issues with the highlights.' Nested sequences need the override set inside the nest; pasting attributes onto a new clip can leave the wrong space ('horrendous color space gizmo gadgetry'). D-Log M clips (Avata 2) take a conversion LUT instead - Color Display Assist tried and too strong, HDR Log Correction 'liking that a lot better', then Curves on the highlight and black points.

Under the Lumetri effect in Effect Controls: ellipse, rectangle, pen (polygon). Pen for uneven horizons, rectangle for flat, ellipse for a car. Mask Feather (~200 in the walkthrough), Mask Opacity (100), Mask Expansion, Inverted. Two-instance recipe: grade the sky, Cmd/Ctrl+C the Lumetri effect, Cmd/Ctrl+V, tick Inverted on the copy, Reset its colour, grade the ground; rename them 'sky' / 'ground'. Tracking: Mask Path forward/backward arrows and single-frame steps; the wrench sets Position / +Rotation / +Scale (leave the last); if it sticks at 0 % quit and restart Premiere; track forward from where the mask was drawn, then backward; small fast subjects slip (the mask sliding from car onto road) and manual keyframing is 'not worth it.' Sky and ground can take different LUTs (Panama City on the sky, Old City Warm on the ground); vignettes can live on a masked instance.

HSL Secondary: eyedropper plus Hue/Saturation/Lightness range bars (top triangles = width, bottom = softness), +/- eyedroppers, Invert, the Color/Gray preview; Refine with Denoise (flicker) and Blur (edges); correct with one wheel or three (shadows/mids/highlights); combine with a pen mask to keep sky out of a road key; widen hue and saturation to full and narrow luma to grab only the brightest sky. Wheels (Color Wheels & Match): Shadows/Midtones/Highlights with brightness sliders he 'basically never' uses; fix a cast (Highlights away from blue for a blue road); cinematic = highlights warm, shadows cool, midtones rebalanced; spill into neighbours, 'be careful how far you go.' HSL Curves (under RGB Curves): Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Saturation, Hue vs Luma; two points bracket a range, the eyedropper places them; recolour a red car blue if the colour is unique; Hue vs Luma bands on 8-bit sky; teal-and-orange by shifting greens/yellows to orange and blues to teal then rebalancing; fix a LUT's over-teal roof; the 'desaturated greens' look after noticing on the vectorscope that DJI greens sit toward yellow. In the walkthrough: a magenta road keyed and desaturated, a bear keyed on luminance, denoised, blurred and brightened; purple-blues to teal; yellow-greens to green with the highlights protected.

Per shot: Settings (colour space) → Basic Correction (contrast up, highlights down, shadows up, WB, saturation) with the waveform open → Creative LUT, three or four auditioned → Curves → Vignette (amount down, midpoint in, feather up); toggle the effect to A/B. LUTs (from the Cinematic Drone LUT pack, 'included in the course'): Old City Warm ~25-30 %, Cinematic Warmth ~25-30 % ('one of my favorite ones to use on drone footage'), Cold Fog ~25 %, Basic Teal and Orange ~40 %, a Log LUT at ~13 %; two LUTs on two instances for a blend. Matching: copy the Lumetri effect or right-click > Paste Attributes (masks included) between the two cow shots, the elk shots, the sky/ground triple; duplicate the source clip first to protect its grade; re-check colour space and highlights after pasting; different scenes needn't match - 'totally different lighting.' The bug: applying a LUT into an existing instance wrecks it - add a fresh instance per LUT. Closes by pasting the first clip's grade onto the last cows shot: 'that is how I color grade drone shots in Premiere Pro.'