This professional Jeven Dovey on Youtube goes through the basics of color correction in this easy tutorial for basic COLOR CORRECTION.
He says that color correction can be broken down into these steps and here is my notes on his video.
STEP 1: CORRECTING ISSUES BY DOING A BASIC CORRECTION GRADE
-Correct Anything That Looks Wrong In Footage
-Correcting Exposure
-Fixing White Balance
-Removing Unwanted Colors
-Adjusting Saturation
STEP 2: GROUP SHOTS
-Group Shots Together That Go Together
STEP 3: CREATE A LOOK / SET OF LOOKS
-Give Your Footage a Style or a LOOK
-Add LUTS globally or to a specific sequence/room/place
-Correct these shots together or as batches
3 TOOLS WE USE TO ASSESS COLOR VALUES
LUMA WAVEFORM - Visual representation of the exposure in your image - higher over exposed - lower under exposed
RGB PARADE - Shot broken into reds/greens/blues - compare where they are in relation to eachother to see which colors are dominating the shot and are not properly balanced - if one color is much higher than the others then this means the color is dominating this image
VECTORESCOPE - All colors in image in disk - the further from center the more SATURATION towards the color but this is really about global BALANCE of color in one quick graph
EXAMPLE OF A GREAT FOOTAGE FIX
-He goes through a great tutorial of a standard underexposed/badly colored shot with baked in purple
-First step, In order to fix the darkness he address each section by brightening the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows NOT by using the MASTER/GLOBAL brightness button
- Second, he pulls up saturation globally since it was flat
-Next, he opens the RGB parade to tests out the balance of the colors he discovers that it has a slight green tint so he uses his TINT tool to put a bit of magenta into it on the slider
-Advanced step - he places an adjustment layer on top of several shots - he drops a LUT on his adjustment layer and he puts on a LUT at intensity 25 percent or just use adjustment layer to create a further GRADE or look
HOW TO ADD AND WORK WITH ADJUSTMENT LAYERS - THE FINAL TOUCHES
-Once the footage has been color corrected and balanced to the desired effect needed in the story, it is on to the final touch which is adding a grade if desired
-Above is how you can add adjustment layers in Premiere CC so you can create a "look" over the top of multiple shots at the same time
-Add Item > Adjustment Layer > Click on to this and add elements
Additional Notes:
-Note: a good monitor does help and he recommends the color pro by view sonic which is expensive