I admit that when I first saw it, the Creative tab puzzled me more than any other. It seems to be pointed to doing the sort of thing one would often do as the last step … apply a ‘look’ to a project. But … it’s right after Basic, and before Curves let alone Color Wheels and HSL Secondary, so it’s in a position to do early work on a clip. Yea, I was puzzled.
The first item is the Looks drop-down list, which is quite long. The top items are some combo camera film-emulation/print stock-emulations LUTs, some of the Looks one might apply to a project as the finishing touch. And then you get into the “SL” list, Looks created by the SpeedLooks people. That list is an interesting mashup of content. Ignore them for now, I’ll cover the contents & uses of that long list in another post.
But … as expert colorist Alexis Van Hurkman teaches (and all other color apps do) … that Look location, coming after the Basic tab, is where you normally should put the LUT that you need for say normalization of camera-produced log media … or, if you’ve developed LUTs to “normalize” a camera so you can use it with a different camera’s media, this is where you’d apply that. (*See note below!)
So yea, at first through thirtieth glance, it was a puzzler. After continually studying what the controls actually do, I finally realized it’s designed to do multiple functions depending on what you need this time through Lumetri. It’s the Swiss Army knife of Lumetri.
The first use for the Creative Tab is for the neutralization of clips, as the place to start with a clip even before using the Basic tab, and in combination with it!
To start the neutralization process, if you need a normalization/Tech LUT, use the Look slot to post a LUT or Look of your own creation or acquisition. You can even fine-tune how much the LUT you apply affects the image by the “Intensity” slider. Sometimes, you need more, sometimes less correction. It works very well for this!
Next, whether you use a normalization LUT or not, set the Creative Tab’s Saturation to 0 … yes, 0!
Now … go back to the basic tab and ignore the Temp/Tint controls there of course (you’ve got no color for a reason!) … and adjust the Basic tab’s tonal controls to get the best tonal view of your media, the correct contrast, whites/black, shadows/highlights. Get the best visual clarity of the important items in your clip.
Return to the Creative tab, and double-click on the Saturation control slider to center it (neutral). Now, using the “Shadow Tint” and “Highlight Tint” controls in that order, do a quick White Balance correction here, instead of the White Balance section in the Basic Tab. Why? Basic tab Temp/Tint only gives you the ability to set the relative white points. Here, you can correct the whole tonal range. And bonus point … it’s processed after the tonal corrections you did in the Basic tab! (The basic tab’s Temp/tint are processed after tonal controls … bad form!)
Start by using the Shadow tint control to (mostly) even the bottoms of your R, G. and B signal traces, then use the Highlight tint control to level the topmost significant feature that shows near the tops of all three RGB Parade channels (set to RGB). After this, most clips will have a very neutral color from shadows through highlights. It’s much better than the Basic tab!
Don’t worry about perfect … just be close to neutral. There’s a lot of controls left after neutralization!
Look at the top image of this post … you can see some shapes both near the bottom and top of the RGB Parade scope trace that are clearly visible across all three channels. I worked Shadow Tint then Highlights Tint to get a close (not perfect) match of those shapes. The final adjustments show in the image to the left above, after a last bit of tweaking the shadows.
The Tint Balance control is useful if for some reason the lighting of the highlight and shadow areas is different and not ‘centered’ on the middle values. You can use that as a ‘pivot’ control to move the area of cross over between the Shadow/Highlight corrections up or down the tonal range.
Next: adjust the Saturation control to tune the amount of intense color, the Vibrance control to adjust the less intense color saturation, checking the results in the Vectorscope YUV to make sure no signal goes outside the bounding box on the scope, and to ‘taste’ by your Mark I eyeball. You’ve now finished the neutralization use of the Creative tab.
After this, it’s on to the Curves tab to do fine-tuning either with the Curves control, or using the Hue curves control. So … for “neutralizing”, it’s Creative Tab, Basic, Creative, then Curves. A bit of work with a mouse, but with the Palette or (as I have) the Tangent Ripple mini-surface or the full Elements surface, it’s pretty fast and fairly intuitive, more so than with a mouse/pen. Much faster.
Using this process with my Elements surface, I’m faster neutralizing most clips than in Resolve, a massive grading app built expressly for grading. That app can do a ton of amazing other things if needed, but for my work, the above process is as good and faster.
The other uses of the Creative tab?
Starting a stylized “Look” for a scene, using probably the Wheels and maybe HSL for further modifications and to complete it. Typically, in a second instance of Lumetri, either applied to the clips themselves or an Adjustment Layer above them. Processed after the neutralization work. Maybe including a camera stock film emulation LUT, like the ones in the Creative Tab’s drop down list.
And to finish the “emulation” process … a third instance of Lumetri, either ‘below’ the other two on a clip or on an A-L above, maybe using a print-stock emulation LUT/Look, one designed to mimic the look of the print film stocks used to send movies to theatres. Plop that in your “last” emulation of your color correction … and leave it and everything after that tab ALONE!
I’ll cover the details of those two uses in the next installments.
* DON’T put your own LUTs/Looks in the folder with the Creative Looks, as tempting as that is to be able to preview your LUTs/Looks in the Preview window. If you do, problems will occur, especially at export!
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