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Hey guys,
Is lightroom better than premiere pro when it comes to color colrecting/color grading?
Thanks,
Rchrj
While you can import video into Lightroom and apply some basic color adjustments to a video, Lightroom is not very efficient or flexible for this. If you are after serious and efficient video color grading you'll want to do it in Premiere Pro, which has much more complete support for things like color LUTs, color looks, traditional scopes (waveform monitor and vectorscope), and much better support for importing and exporting video formats.
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These are two different programs designed for completely different purposes. It's difficult to compare the features you are asking about.
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While you can import video into Lightroom and apply some basic color adjustments to a video, Lightroom is not very efficient or flexible for this. If you are after serious and efficient video color grading you'll want to do it in Premiere Pro, which has much more complete support for things like color LUTs, color looks, traditional scopes (waveform monitor and vectorscope), and much better support for importing and exporting video formats.
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Conrad C - Jim Hess:
I have been doing color corecting in pfremiere pro with good results. I have lightroom but never really messed around with it. I just assumed it had some color correcting capabilities. I saw a sunset photo someone worked in lightroom with it and it came out awesome.
Thanks for the replies.
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Lightroom and Premiere Pro both have excellent color correction capabilities. But each of them is optimized for their disciplines. Lightroom is designed to color-correct stills in a photographer-friendly environment, especially raw format still images. Premiere Pro is designed to fit into the traditional color-correction workflows of the video/film world. So while both Lightroom and Premiere Pro are powerful tools, they're not interchangeable.
The main problem you'll have with Lightroom is that while it can import video, it can't correct video as easily as a still image. If you've used Lightroom, you know that the deep editing happens in the Develop module. But video is not even allowed into the Develop module. The main way you color-correct video in Lightroom is to use the Quick Develop controls in the Library module, but they aren't as precise as the Develop module controls, and on top of that, only a subset of the still image color controls are enabled for video. It's a real pain compared to color-correcting video in Premiere Pro. Also, you can't keyframe color correction changes over time like you can in Premiere Pro.
The main reason Lightroom handles video at all is because most still cameras today also record video, so Lightroom lets you import both off your camera cards and make basic trims and adjustments. But the support for video is quite minimal, it's really only for photographers who don't already have a good video-editing program. If you are good at using Premiere Pro, it's hard to come up with a reason to color-correct videos in Lightroom. In the same way, if you're good in Lightroom, it would be hard to find a reason to correct your still photos in Premiere Pro.
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Depending on the make of camera you are using, Lightroom will offer different camera profiles that emulate the in-camera settings. If you couple working with those profiles and learning to use the adjustment controls in Lightroom it's possible to achieve superb results. I have used Premier Pro a little bit, and find it difficult to compare the two programs. My impression is that if you are working with still images you will probably get superior results from Lightroom. But it doesn't come automatically. Every program requires effort to learn how to use it effectively.