60. Enhance Video with Advanced Image Controls BEFORE YOU BEGIN 58 About Preset Effects 68 About the Properties Panel SEE ALSO 59 Adjust Color and Brightness 67 About Keyframing 75 Control a Video Effect with Keyframes In addition to basic Image Controls such as Brightness, Contrast, Hue, and Saturation (described in 59 Adjust Color and Brightness), Premiere Elements offers a variety of more advanced effects for correcting or controlling the color, sharpness, and tone of your image. 1. | Select the Clip to Be Affected
Click the clip in need of color correction on the Timeline. A default list of the clip's properties appears in the Properties panel, including Image Control, Motion, Opacity, and Volume (as applicable to the clip).
TIP Another excellent tool for image correction is Shadow/Highlight (located in the Adjust category of the Video FX collection). This effect automatically softens the contrast between the brightest and darkest areas in an image while bringing up the midtonesvery effective on an image in which, for instance, the brightness of the sky washes out the details of a shaded area. | 2. | Apply Auto Color to the Clip
Note that, as you browse each collection in the Effects and Transitions panel, the effects and transitions are displayed as thumbnails. If an effect involves action, click that effect or transition's thumbnail to see a thumbnail preview of that action.
In the Adjust collection on the Video FX page, select the Auto Color effect and drag it onto your clip. The Auto Color effect is added to the Properties panel for this clip.
| 3. | Adjust Effect Controls
The Auto Color effect works by automatically setting the brightest pixel in your screen image to pure white and the darkest pixel in your screen image to pure black, balancing the midtones based on those settings.
60. Enhance Video with Advanced Image Controls But, as discussed in 58 About Preset Effects, automatic color correction doesn't always work like magic. The effect, after all, merely makes an approximation of the correct image settings.
NOTE A challenge for the Auto Color effect is that it is applied to each frame in a clip. However, because video is a moving image, the composition of your screen image can change over the course of the clip, challenging the Auto Color effect to keep up. You can sometimes generate more accurate Auto Color results by splitting the clip with the Razor tool (see 36 Split a Clip) at points in which the picture composition changes radically. In the Properties panel, click the triangle to the left of Auto Color to open the effect's control panel. Here you'll find settings for Temporal Smoothing (which averages the pixels for a smoother color blend), Scene Detect (which overrides the Temporal Smoothing settings when the scene content changes) and Blend With Original (which averages the corrected color of your screen image with the color settings of the original clip).
Experiment with these settings and see how your clip is affected. You can also supplement these changes by making changes to the settings in the Image Control property.
The White Clip and Black Clip percentages limit the range of black and white pixels. Auto Color, by default, limits these ranges to .1%. By raising these clip ranges, you can further affect the image by increasing the image's contrast. Each of these settings can go as high as 10%.
Selecting the option to Snap Neutral Midtones can also often make a very effective change to your image's color quality by automatically finding and setting the image's midtones based on the darkest and lightest points.
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