SLOG3 comes out of the camera flat, washed out, and gray, and the first time you drop it on a timeline it is genuinely discouraging. So here is how I take it from that to contrasty and saturated and actually good looking, in Premiere Pro, using no LUTs at all.
One thing before we start. If you didn’t film it right in the first place, grading it is going to be much, much harder, so if you haven’t already, go watch how to easily film in SLOG3 first. Everything below assumes your exposure was in the right place on the day.
What Color Grading Actually Is
At its heart, color grading is shifting and modifying the colors in a film to create a certain mood. And mood is the whole point, because the colors you choose genuinely change the emotional response somebody has watching it. Speaking very generally: darker and bluer reads sadder and more tragic, warmer with more saturation reads happier and more energetic.
That’s the tip of the iceberg and your options are basically unlimited, so what you’re going for is up to you and the film you’re making. But you should decide, on purpose, before you start dragging things around.
Find Your Hero Shot
Step one is picking a hero shot. This is the one clip you grade first and properly, and then you use it as the baseline for everything else in the film, which is what makes this fast instead of miserable.
You want your hero shot to have good variety in both color and exposure. The one I picked has the sun coming in on one side, real shadows down at the bottom, and, most importantly, skin in it.
That sounds weird written down. What I mean is that if there are people in your video, your hero shot needs to include them, so you can see what’s happening to their skin tones as you work. Otherwise you’ll grade a beautiful landscape and then discover your couple has gone blue like Smurfs, or green like the Hulk.
And yes, those are donkeys in my hero shot. They’re called beer burros, the couple had them brought along for the photo shoot, and they’ve got little baskets to carry beer in. They’re pretty awesome.
The Lumetri Color Panel
Switch to the Color workspace and the Lumetri Color panel shows up on the right. If yours doesn’t look like mine, go to Window, then Workspaces, then Reset to Saved Layout, and it’ll come back.
You’ll see Basic Correction, Creative, Curves, Color Wheels & Match, HSL Secondary, and Vignette. That’s a lot, and it looks overwhelming, but here’s the good news: we’re only going to use three of them. Basic Correction, Curves, and Color Wheels. That’s it.
And here’s the counterintuitive part. Do not start in Basic Correction. It’s the first tab, it has the exposure and contrast sliders you’d expect to reach for, and on SLOG3 it just doesn’t work. Push the exposure, nope. Brighter, darker, highlights up, shadows down, blacks down. It never looks good. Double click those sliders to reset them and leave that tab alone until much later.
Curves Are Your Friend
If you take one thing away from this whole thing, make it curves.
In the Curves tab you get RGB Curves with a white dot and a red, green, and blue dot. The colored ones let you change contrast for those individual channels, but we want all of them, so keep white selected. Under it is a diagonal line, and that line is your image: bottom left is your shadows, the middle is your mid-tones, the top is your highlights.
Click in the middle to add a point and drag it up, and the image gets brighter. Click down in the shadows and drag down, and the shadows get darker while the mid-tones stay up. Then add a point in the highlights and lift it, watch the sky start to blow out, and back it off until you can still see detail in the clouds.
Toggle the effect off and on in Effect Controls and you’ll see you’ve already fixed most of the contrast, with three clicks, before touching a single color.
Lumetri Scopes, Or How To Stop Guessing
So how do you know whenever your contrast is right? Do you just eyeball it and hope? No. You can be scientific about this, and it takes about ten seconds to learn.
Open Lumetri Scopes at the top left. The one you care about is the waveform. Down the left side you have numbers from 0 to 100, where 0 is the absolute darkest black you can get and 100 is where things start to clip and blow out.
Turn your curves off and watch what happens: the whole waveform squishes into the middle of the range. That squish is SLOG3. Turn the curves back on and it spreads out to fill the scope, which is the entire job in one picture.
Now drag your shadow point down and watch the left side of the waveform crush toward zero. Go too far and you’re throwing away real information, the image starts to look videoy, and the poor beer burro goes completely black. Push the highlights up and you’ll see them approach 100 and clip. So instead of hoping, you look at the scope and it tells you.
Color Wheels
Contrast is handled, but everything still looks blue and washed out. Close Curves, open Color Wheels & Match, and you get three wheels: shadows, mid-tones, highlights. Which should sound familiar, because that’s exactly what the curve was divided into. It’s all connected.
Drag the mid-tone puck around and you’ll see how fast this gets away from you. Toward green and everybody’s the Hulk. Toward purple and the whole frame goes purple. The key word for this entire tab is subtlety. Double click to reset and then move it a genuinely small amount.
For this shot I went slightly warm on the mid-tones because there’s sun coming in and I want that warmth, then took the highlights toward gold, because it was sunset and that’s what sunset actually looks like. This is where you decide what you’re making. Darker and moodier, or brighter and happier? It’s a wedding film and I want this couple looking vibrant, so I’m going bright, warm, and saturated.
Now Go Back To Basic Correction
Remember Basic Correction, the tab that was useless twenty minutes ago? Now it’s great. At the end of the process, whenever the heavy lifting is done, those sliders are perfect for small tweaks that make the image pop.
Nudge the temperature a smidge warmer. Then go to saturation, because SLOG3 is desaturated by nature and you’re going to need it. I find 120 usually looks right. You can go higher, and you can absolutely go too far, and there’s a point where it stops looking like film and starts looking like a phone filter. Subtle changes. You’ll get there.
I put together Premiere Pro LOG Color Grading INSTANTLY Without LUTs – Color Management Tutorial and Should you buy the Sony a7S II in 2021? as well, which cover the part I skipped over here.
Applying The Hero Shot To Everything Else
This is where all that work pays off. Select the hero clip, go to Effect Controls, click Lumetri Color, and hit Ctrl+C, or Cmd+C on a Mac. Then select your next clip and paste.
On my second clip, the groom getting dressed, the paste made him extremely orange. Don’t panic, that’s normal, and it’s still a huge step in the right direction because the contrast came along with it.
Pull the scopes up and you’ll see this shot is sitting way too deep in the shadows, mostly because of his dark jacket, so lift the shadow point until the blacks stop crushing and you keep the roll-off on the jacket. That’s the other great thing about SLOG3, by the way: as long as you filmed it right, you can push and pull it a long way before it falls apart.
Fixing Green Skin
The real problem with this shot is that he’s standing next to a window with green grass outside, so the sun is bouncing green off the lawn and straight onto his face.
Reset the temperature and the warm wheel settings you copied from the sunset shot, because they don’t belong here. Then take the mid-tones, which control most of his skin, warmer and slightly toward magenta, and watch his skin get a healthier red tone. Go too far and the wall behind him turns purple, so back it off.
The whole thing is a balance between complementary colors, and once it clicks you’ll use it constantly. Too green, go red. Too red, go green. Too blue, go orange. That’s it, that’s the trick.
I’ll also say I’m not a big fan of messing with the shadow wheel unless I need to, because shifting shadow color goes weird faster than anything else in this panel. Here I took the shadows just barely into blue, to put a little coolness back in his jacket and offset the warmth, and that’s as far as I’d push it.
The Dark Reception Shot
Third clip is dancing at the reception, and it’s much darker than either of the others, which is where people usually give up.
Here’s the life hack. If pasting your hero shot onto a clip doesn’t work, don’t force it. Paste from whichever clip you’ve already graded that’s closest to it instead. I deleted the hero grade off this one and pasted the groom’s grade in, which was much nearer the mark, and then made small adjustments from there.
Cool the temperature down, back off the magenta in the wheels until the dress reads white again, then push the shadows a little darker. I genuinely don’t care whether the band in the background is visible. I want the focus on the couple, and dropping the background is how you get it.
The Short Version
- Grade one hero shot properly, with skin in it, then copy it to everything else.
- Skip Basic Correction at the start. Come back to it at the end.
- Curves for contrast. Three points: shadows, mid-tones, highlights.
- Watch the waveform instead of guessing.
- Color Wheels for mood, in very small movements.
- Saturation around 120, because SLOG3 starts flat.
- Whenever a paste doesn’t fit, paste from the nearest graded clip instead.
Curves are your friend. Color wheels are your friend. Subtlety is the whole game.
If you want to skip most of this, I built a set of color presets for SLOG3 that get you a long way in one click and that you can then tweak using everything above. And if you don’t have Premiere yet, there’s a free trial.
The gear I shoot all of this on is at my a7S III wedding kit, my free guide to booking more wedding clients is here whenever you want it, and there are a few thousand of us in the Learn Wedding Filmmaking Facebook group.