How to Use Color Wheels in Premiere Pro

A workflow taught by Adobe Certified Instructors at Adobe Video World.

The color wheels in Premiere Pro’s Lumetri panel give you intuitive control over color in your shadows, midtones, and highlights separately. They’re the heart of creating cinematic looks and balancing color naturally. This guide explains how the three color wheels work and how to use them to grade footage with depth and intention.

What the Color Wheels Do

Lumetri’s Color Wheels section gives you three wheels — for Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights — letting you push color into each tonal range independently. This is also called three-way color correction.

By coloring the dark, middle, and bright parts of your image separately, you gain precise, intuitive control over the look. The wheels are a colorist’s primary tool for both balancing footage neutrally and crafting stylized cinematic grades.

Understand the Three Ranges

Each wheel targets a different brightness range. The Shadows wheel affects the darkest parts, Midtones the middle values like most skin and detail, and Highlights the brightest areas, so you control color across the whole tonal range.

This separation is powerful because you can warm the highlights while cooling the shadows, for instance. Understanding which wheel affects which part of the image is the foundation of using them effectively to shape a grade.

Push Color with the Wheels

Each wheel works by dragging the center point toward a color to tint that tonal range. Drag the Shadows wheel toward blue to cool the darks, or the Highlights wheel toward orange to warm the brights, shaping the color of each range.

Small movements have a big effect, so subtle pushes usually look best. The intuitive nature of dragging toward a color makes the wheels a natural way to grade, letting you feel your way to a look rather than fiddling with numbers.

Use the Sliders Beside Each Wheel

Each color wheel has a vertical slider beside it that controls the brightness of that tonal range. So you can lift the shadows, brighten the midtones, or pull down the highlights, adjusting luminance alongside color.

These sliders let you shape contrast and exposure per range, not just color. Lifting the shadows slightly with the slider creates a faded, filmic look, while adjusting the others fine-tunes the tonal balance of your image.

Balance Color Neutrally

The wheels are excellent for correcting color casts. If your shadows have a blue tint, push the Shadows wheel slightly toward orange to neutralize it, balancing the image so neutral areas look truly neutral.

Using the wheels alongside the scopes to check your balance gives accurate, objective results. This neutral correction is often the first step, getting the footage clean before you add a stylized look on top.

Create a Cinematic Look

The wheels excel at crafting stylized grades. The popular teal-and-orange look comes from pushing shadows toward teal and highlights toward warm orange, creating the complementary contrast seen throughout cinema.

Experimenting with different color pushes in each range, drawing on our color theory guide, lets you create moods from warm and nostalgic to cold and tense. The wheels make these looks intuitive to dial in and adjust.

Color Wheels vs. Curves

The color wheels and curves both grade tonal ranges, but differently. The wheels are intuitive and fast for pushing color into shadows, midtones, and highlights, while curves offer more precise, granular control over specific points.

Many colorists use both — the wheels for the overall look and feel, and curves for precise refinements. Knowing when each suits the task, the wheels for broad intuitive grading and curves for surgical control, makes your color work efficient and powerful.

Color Wheels Best Practices

• Use the three wheels to color shadows, midtones, and highlights.
• Make subtle pushes — small movements have big effects.
• Use the sliders to shape brightness per tonal range.
• Balance casts neutrally first, then create a stylized look.

Common Color Wheel Mistakes

• Pushing the wheels too far, creating garish color.
• Ignoring the scopes when balancing color.
• Confusing which wheel affects which tonal range.
• Adding a stylized look before correcting the footage.

A Real Color Wheel Grade Example

Take a flat, slightly cool clip shot at golden hour that should feel warm. You start with the Highlights wheel, nudging it toward orange so the bright sky and rim light glow, then push the Shadows wheel gently toward teal for a complementary contrast. The Midtones stay near neutral so the skin tones remain believable.

Finally you lift the shadow slider a touch for a soft, filmic fade and pull the highlights down slightly to protect the sky. Each move is subtle, but together the wheels transform the dull clip into a warm, cinematic golden-hour image — the intuitive, feel-your-way grading that makes the color wheels a colorist’s favorite starting point.

Match Shots with the Color Wheels

The color wheels are invaluable for matching shots so a scene cuts together seamlessly. When two clips from different cameras or moments don’t match, you can push the wheels on one to bring its shadows, midtones, and highlights into line with the other, unifying the look across the edit.

Comparing the clips side by side and watching the scopes as you adjust gives you objective targets to match. This shot-matching, alongside the workflow in our color matching guide, is one of the most practical uses of the wheels, keeping a multi-shot scene feeling like one cohesive, intentional whole.

Color Wheels in a Full Grading Workflow

The wheels rarely work alone — they’re one stage in a complete grade. A typical flow balances exposure and white balance first, then uses the wheels to establish the overall color mood across the tonal ranges, before refining specific colors with HSL Secondary and fine contrast with curves.

Understanding where the wheels fit in this order keeps your grading efficient and layered rather than fighting one tool to do everything. Built on the foundations in our color grading guide, the wheels provide the intuitive heart of a look that the other Lumetri tools then polish to completion.

Key Takeaways

• The color wheels grade shadows, midtones, and highlights separately.
• Drag each wheel toward a color to tint that range.
• Use the sliders to control brightness per range.
• Balance color neutrally first, then craft a cinematic look.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I use the color wheels in Premiere Pro?

In the Lumetri Color panel’s Color Wheels section, drag each wheel — Shadows, Midtones, Highlights — toward a color to tint that tonal range, and use the slider beside each to adjust its brightness.

What do the three color wheels control?

Each wheel targets a brightness range: Shadows affect the darkest parts, Midtones the middle values like skin and detail, and Highlights the brightest areas. This lets you color each tonal range independently.

How do I create a teal and orange look?

Push the Shadows wheel toward teal and the Highlights wheel toward warm orange, creating the complementary contrast seen throughout cinema. Keep the pushes subtle and check your balance against the scopes.

Sources: Wikipedia’s overview of color grading.