Sunday, January 19, 2020

Fixing Poor Lighting in Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a truly powerful editing tool used mostly for video but also still photographs.

This post shows how video clips can be lightened or darkened. Ideally, interviews, b-roll and other types of video shots look perfect when done in the field.

But should that not be the case, this brief tutorial found on YouTube can help.

Here is an example of using this Premiere Pro lighting tool to improve a video clip. Below are still shots before and after. 




In my video production and editing class I gave the students a basic first assignment to post a 30-second video. Introduce yourself and/or talk about what you like about going to school at SC State.  Pretty simple assignment, but one that also brings into play on-camera presentation and delivery and shooting, composing video and getting good audio.


I asked the students on their blogs to post their original, raw 30-second talk, then create and post a second version. This version may be trimmed if needed and should have music with it and a "super" with the student's name and SC State under it.

After viewing the videos, I saw that a few weren't shot in the best lighting. The camera filters could have made this better. So I will show them in class how this can be fixed or at least made a little better using tools in Premiere.  As an example, I found a dark video, then did the steps to make it brighter.  Then I put in some music and text.  Here are the three versions and descriptions.


I took this some months ago using my iPhone7. I didn't have a chance to turn on any lights, as I could tell my Persian cat Sebastian (Bash for short) was about to jump from the kitchen island to the sink area. He can also jump to the counters from the ground. We have had several Persians prior to Bash. He is the only one with such jumping skills!  


Using Premiere Pro's video effects tools, I was able to brighten up the video. It still doesn't look great, but it shows what can be done.  


For this "mini-masterpiece" (ha) I found music on a royalty free music site I really like called Incompetch.com. It has thousands of tune selections in a wide variety of moods, tempo and vibes such as suspenseful, bouncy, bright, aggressive and suspenseful. The last category is where I found this little ditty called "Circus of Freaks." 

The three short videos shown above were first uploaded to YouTube (here's my YouTube channel). I recommend doing this to my students because from YouTube videos can easily and smoothly be posted in a blog post. Blogger and YouTube, after all, are part of the big Google family.  

I didn't need to do it in this video, but should you want to crop the border of a video or clip, that's pretty easy too. Here's a tutorial on that.  And a video tutorial from YouTube here

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