Make Your Footage Shine with These Free Cinematic Looks for Adobe SpeedGrade & Premiere Pro CC

Of the countless post-production blogs on the web, Oliver Peters' blog Digital Films is one of the absolute best. Not only does Peters cover a vast array of digital post-production tools and softwares in great detail, but on occasion, he also shares some of his custom-made color presets for various platforms. Because of the popularity of his FCPX Color Board presets, Peters also made a set of Lumetri Looks that can be used directly inside of both Adobe SpeedGrade and Premiere Pro. In a recent blog post, Peters not only shared these free looks, but also everything you need to know in order to use them in your projects. Check it out!

For a little bit of background on Lumetri Looks and the Lumetri Deep Color Engine, the technology was originally an integral part of Iridas SpeedGrade. The software was then purchased by Adobe, and SpeedGrade made its Adobe debut with the release of CS6. Then with the release of the Creative Cloud (CC) versions of the applications a year later, the engineers at Adobe had successfully incorporated the Lumetri technology directly into Premiere Pro CC. This gave users of the software the ability to apply looks created with the powerful color tools of SpeedGrade directly into Premiere.

One of the best aspects of this technology is that the looks are relatively easy to create within SpeedGrade and then export. That's exactly what Oliver Peters did with this group of presets that can be opened and edited within SpeedGrade or applied directly to footage inside of Premiere Pro CC with the "Lumetri Effect."

Here's the original log image on which these looks were created, as well as a few different variations of the looks included in Peters' presets.

Here's what Peters had to say about how to get these looks into SpeedGrade.

To start, download the file from the link below and unzip the archive file. Inside, you’ll find a folder called “op_sgrades”.

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On a Mac, the supplied Looks styles (Lumetri and SpeedLooks) are inside the closed application bundle. To install this new folder, you need to open the SpeedGrade CC package contents (right-click the application icon and choose “show package contents”). This will expose the application’s Contents folder. From there, navigate to the MacOS subfolder and then the Look Examples subfolder. Drag the “op_sgrades” folder into the Look Examples folder. When you next open SpeedGrade CC, you will be able to access this new set of Looks in the Looks Management pane.

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On a PC, right-click the application program icon and select “open file location”. This will expose a set of files, including the Look Examples folder.

What I absolutely love about these presets is that most of them are quite a bit more subtle and refined than your typical preset bundles (like the presets included with SpeedGrade, which are a bit over the top). For me, this makes Olivers' presets quite a bit more useable right out of the box. It's important to note, however, that because these presets were all created for the image above, they may need to be adjusted slightly within SpeedGrade in order to make them look their best with your footage.

In all of these, the first Primary layer (bottom of the stack) will be the same and is used to neutralize the image. The sliders I adjusted include input saturation, pivot, contrast, temperature and magenta. Only the global settings were adjusted in this layer. You can tweak it, hide/disable it or replace it with a LUT adjustment instead.

For more information about these looks, head on over to Peters' blog. To download this excellent free bundle, just click here.

Have you guys used Lumetri looks inside of Premiere Pro? Do you like to create your own inside of SpeedGrade? Let's hear your thoughts about this process and the technology behind it down in the comments!

Link: SpeedGrade Looks -- Digital Films