How to Use Lumetri Curves in Premiere Pro

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

Lumetri Curves are among the most powerful color grading tools in Premiere Pro, giving you precise control over brightness and color. The RGB curves shape contrast and tone, while the hue-based curves target specific colors surgically. This guide explains each curve type and how to use them for professional, controlled grades.

Why Curves Are So Powerful

Curves give you fine, non-destructive control over exactly how tones and colors are mapped in your image. Instead of broad sliders, you adjust specific points along a curve, shaping precisely which brightness levels or colors change and by how much.

This precision makes curves a favorite of professional colorists. Once you understand them, you can craft contrast, fix casts, and target individual colors with a control that basic sliders can’t match, all within the Lumetri Color panel.

Read the RGB Curve

The RGB Curves graph maps input brightness (horizontal) to output brightness (vertical), with a diagonal line representing no change. Dragging a point up brightens those tones; dragging down darkens them, all smoothly blended.

The left of the curve controls shadows, the middle the midtones, and the right the highlights. Understanding this layout lets you reach in and adjust exactly the part of the tonal range you want, from deep blacks to bright highlights.

Create Contrast with an S-Curve

The classic move is the S-curve: pull the shadows down slightly and the highlights up, forming a gentle S. This deepens darks and brightens lights, adding rich, pleasing contrast that gives an image punch and dimension.

An S-curve is often the single most impactful grade you can make, instantly lifting a flat shot. Keeping the curve gentle avoids crushing detail, while a steeper S adds more dramatic contrast for a bolder look.

Adjust Individual Color Channels

The RGB curves also let you adjust the red, green, and blue channels separately. Lifting the blue channel in the shadows adds a cool tint to darks, while pulling red from the highlights cools the brights, giving you precise color control.

This per-channel adjustment is how you create stylized color grades and correct casts. By shaping each channel’s curve in shadows, midtones, and highlights independently, you can craft sophisticated looks that affect different tonal ranges in different ways.

Use Hue vs. Saturation

The Hue vs. Saturation curve lets you target one color and change its intensity. Select a color along the curve and raise or lower it to make, say, a red jacket more vivid or a distracting green wall more muted, leaving everything else untouched.

This targeted control is incredibly useful for emphasizing or downplaying specific colors. It’s the tool for making a sky pop, calming an overly saturated element, or drawing the eye to a key color, all without affecting the rest of the frame.

Explore the Other Hue Curves

Lumetri offers several hue-based curves, each targeting color differently. Hue vs. Hue shifts one color to another, Hue vs. Luma changes a color’s brightness, and Luma vs. Saturation adjusts saturation based on brightness.

These give surgical control — shifting a teal toward blue, darkening a specific color, or desaturating only the highlights. Learning what each curve targets lets you solve specific color problems precisely, a level of control beyond what the basic correction sliders offer.

Refine Skin Tones with Curves

Curves excel at perfecting skin. Using Hue vs. Saturation or Hue vs. Hue, you can subtly adjust skin tones — calming redness, warming a pale complexion, or nudging the hue toward natural — without altering the rest of the image.

Because skin tone is so important to how a shot reads, this targeted refinement matters. Checking your adjustments against the vectorscope’s skin tone line ensures faces stay believable while you fine-tune them with curves.

Keep Adjustments Subtle

Curves are powerful enough to wreck an image if overdone, producing crushed shadows, blown highlights, or garish colors. The best grades usually involve gentle, deliberate adjustments rather than aggressive ones that introduce banding or unnatural tones.

Make small moves and evaluate the whole image as you go. A series of subtle curve adjustments, layered thoughtfully, produces a polished, professional grade, while heavy-handed curves quickly tip an image into looking processed and artificial.

Lumetri Curves Best Practices

• Use a gentle S-curve on RGB for pleasing contrast.
• Adjust individual color channels for casts and stylized looks.
• Use Hue vs. Saturation to target and tune specific colors.
• Refine skin tones with the hue curves and check the scopes.

Common Curve Mistakes

• Over-steep curves that crush shadows or blow highlights.
• Pushing color channels until the image looks unnatural.
• Ignoring the targeted hue curves for color problems.
• Heavy adjustments that introduce banding.

A Real Curves Grade Example

Take a flat, slightly cool clip straight off the camera. You start in RGB curves with a gentle S — shadows down a touch, highlights up — and the image instantly gains depth and punch. Then you lift the blue channel slightly in the shadows and pull a little blue from the highlights, warming the brights while keeping the darks cool for a filmic split-tone.

Finally you open Hue vs. Saturation, dip the over-vivid green of some background foliage, and nudge the subject’s skin hue toward natural. Each move is small, but stacked together the curves transform a dull frame into a graded, intentional image — the everyday power of working point by point rather than with broad sliders.

Curves vs. the Basic Sliders

Premiere’s basic correction sliders and the curves overlap, but they serve different needs. Sliders are fast and intuitive for broad exposure and white-balance moves, while curves give surgical, region-specific control — adjusting just the highlights, or just one color, in ways a single slider can’t.

Most editors use both: sliders for the initial balance, then curves to refine contrast and target colors precisely. Knowing when a quick slider will do and when a problem calls for the precision of curves, within the wider grading workflow, is what makes color work both fast and polished.

Key Takeaways

• Curves give precise, non-destructive control over tone and color.
• An S-curve on RGB adds rich, pleasing contrast.
• Per-channel curves create casts and stylized grades.
• Hue curves target specific colors and refine skin tones.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I use Lumetri Curves in Premiere Pro?

In the Lumetri Color panel’s Curves section, drag points on the RGB graph to shape brightness and contrast, or use the hue-based curves (like Hue vs. Saturation) to target and adjust specific colors precisely.

What is an S-curve and why use it?

An S-curve pulls shadows down slightly and highlights up, forming an S shape on the RGB curve. It deepens darks and brightens lights to add rich, pleasing contrast — often the single most impactful grade you can make.

How do I make one color pop with curves?

Use the Hue vs. Saturation curve. Select the color along the curve and raise it to increase its intensity, making a sky or a jacket more vivid while leaving every other color in the frame untouched.

Sources: Wikipedia’s overview of the curve color adjustment.