Easy: Increase saturation to make colors more intense and vibrant. Premiere Pro does not have a saturation video effect, but the Fast Color Corrector has a saturation property. The default value is 100, which does not affect colors. A setting of 0 removes all color (creating a grayscale image). I suggest you try 125 to create a richer overall look to your video.

Fig. 10 (Click to enlarge)

Intermediate: Shift the overall hue to set a mood. The Fast Color Corrector has a Hue Balance and Angle color wheel. Rotating the outer ring (Hue Angle) clockwise shifts the overall color toward red. Counterclockwise shifts toward green. Dragging the little circle in the center toward a color (Balance Magnitude and Angle) increases the intensity of the target color. In Figure 1I rotated Hue Angle 15 degrees toward red and dragged the Balance Magnitude circle toward orange.

Fig. 11 (Click to enlarge)

Advanced: Shift hue values within shadows, midtones or highlights. The Three-Way Color Corrector has three color wheels, one each for shadows, midtones and highlights. In Figure 1 I rotated the highlights and midtones outer wheels toward red, dragged the highlights Balance Magnitude toward yellow to enhance the blond hair and dragged the midtones Balance Magnitude toward orange to give the image a warmer feel.

Colorist: Adjust hue values based on a selected color range. Use the Three-Way Color Corrector Secondary Color Correction feature to select an area of the clip within a color range, and then adjust the three color wheels to individually affect only that selection's shadows, midtones and highlights.

Here are a few specialized video effects that you might want to try out:

• Tint :uses pixel luminance to create a blend between two colors. You "map" one color to black (no luminance) and another to white (full luminance). Another way to tint is to create a solid-color matte (orange or blue are good choices depending on the mood you want to set), place it on a track above your clip and reduce its opacity.
• Leave Color :removes all colors (changes them to gray) except a color range you set. This is a cool way to have an object or person in color with everything else set to gray.
• Change to Color :adjusts the hue and tonality of a color range you select. This is a fun way to have a colored object shift to another color. You can use keyframes to have colors change over time. Premiere Pro also has a Change Color effect that does more or the less the same thing, but it has fewer options than Change to Color.

I suggest you make enhancing tonality and color a regular part of your video production workflow. Doing so will lead to better results and happier clients.

Jeff Sengstack is an Adobe Certified Expert in Premiere Pro and Photoshop, author of three books on Adobe Premiere and a junior college computer science instructor. He recently completed a video tutorial for lynda.com on Premiere Elements 7, the consumer-level video editor from Adobe.