From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Fixing Video Exposure Problems

Adding masks - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro Guru: Fixing Video Exposure Problems

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Adding masks

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- Frequently, when you want to adjust a shot, you'll find yourself wanting to make a partial change. Maybe it's just at the sky at the top of the frame, or maybe it's just on your subject's face. Fortunately, the Lumetri effect, as well as every effect practically in Premiere Pro, supports the use of masks. A mask is a vector-based selection that can isolate the effect to apply inside or outside the mask. I've got two examples here. Let's just pan down the shot so you can see them a little better. And if we toggle between these, you see first the unaffected shot and then the process shot. You'll notice that I lifted the wood in the foreground while darkening the water and the mountain range. Here's the next example. We've got a shot, and I've further darkened down the background a little bit. If we look at this here, you'll see there's the original and the new shot. We'll explore the second example in a moment, but let's come back to the first. What we can do with the Lumetri effect is actually make a selection. I find this is quite useful if you zoom out slightly. So, set your magnification level back a little bit so you can see the whole frame. In the Lumetri panel, make your first adjustment. In this case, I'm going to lift up the shadows a little bit, boost the contrast, and put a little saturation in. Now, using the Pen tool, I can make an adjustment. I'll just click here to create a basic mask. Let's pop in a little bit. We'll fit that. And with each click it's going to add a point. You can rotate that. I'll zoom in a little bit here so it's easier to see. You can add a point and then move it if needed. You pull, you'll see it also creates rounding. Remember, you can move that point after the fact. There we go. And I'm just making the basic selection. Remember, you can pan across here as well, and the pulling effect on those handles creates a curve. Just click. You may have to go a little further away. There we go. And then pull it back into place. There we go. And as we get to the edge here, I'm just going to go beyond the edge. So, I'll pull out here a little bit, making it easier to see around the object, and I'm going to click. This is going to give me room for the feathering of the mask. Once I close that loop, you'll see a handle appears. Let's fit that back in. This handle is useful. It allows you to create a transition zone. So, now that adjustment, let's crank that really, is applied mostly to the foreground with a gentle transition to the edge. I like that. We'll make the blacks a little richer but lift the shadows more. There we go. Now, that same effect can be reused. I can copy, Control or Command + C, and then Control or Command + V to paste, and simply twirl that down and go to the mask. In this case, I click Inverted on the second option. And with that Lumetri Color selected, we'll just pull down the exposure in the background. And I can even cool that down a little more. In this case, the feather is a little much, so I'll pull that in so it doesn't have as much of a glow and slightly expand the mask so it bleeds into the foreground object. There we go. And that looks good. So, now if we toggle that on and off, you'll see that two different color correctors were applied. One to the foreground and one to the background. And the same mask was able to be used with slight modification to select both halves of the scene. Another benefit of masks, though, is that they don't have to remain static. They can actually animate with key frames or follow a moving object. Let's go to that second example here. In this case, I've already made a basic selection. Here's the object. I'll double-click to load the footage and go to the effects. You'll see the Lumetri Color effect is darkening down the background, but a mask was applied to select the flower. In this case, a basic selection, and note you can drag to reposition as needed or move any of those individual points or handles to get the best results. There we go. I'll press the up arrow to go to the first frame of the shot. That looks pretty good. You'll notice under the Mask controls that you have a play button here. This will actually track the selection. From the tracking method, too, you can also deal with what's happening. For example, does the object just move? Is the camera bouncing up and down or side to side? Does it have a slight rotation to it because the camera is actually rotating on its base? Maybe it's handheld and the operator is moving a bit. Or, does it go in and out requiring scale? This really denotes to what's happening in the real world. A position move is just going to be side to side or up and down. That may happen if you're hand-holding a camera and it's relatively stable. However, if you're hand-holding a camera and you're moving a little bit, maybe on a dock or a vibrating car, you might have some rotation. And as soon as the camera starts going in and out ever so slightly, well, the use of scale can be useful to track the object. And even if the camera is rock solid, if the subject is moving, you might also want to try those methods. When you're ready, simply select the mask and click the play button to track forward. It'll analyze the footage and try to find the moving subject. Now, this doesn't work in all cases, particularly if something passes in front of the object, but you could frequently use this to track a gently moving subject. And you'll notice that key frames are created. Additionally, if you so desire, you can go in and manually add key frames to deal with a moving object. In this case, as the flower is blowing in the wind, even though the camera is locked off on a tripod, it's able to deal with the fact that the subject is coming closer and further away from the camera and that the object is blowing a little bit. Then, there was a small camera move as I tried to recompose, and it still adjusted. Once it reaches the final frame of the shot, you'll see that a series of key frames have been added. Additionally, you can add key frames for feathering and opacity to refine the effect over time. Let's drag through there, and you see that the mask is animated to move with the subject. In this case, a very heavy feather value was applied. What that's allowing for is a gentle darkening of the background to create a highlight effect that really pops the subject of the frame. Alright, now that you've got a handle on the overall layout of the Lumetri effect and some of the scopes that you're going to use and tools at your disposal, let's jump in and start to explore the effect in detail with the basic adjustments first.

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