Lightningad1

ok - its a few hours late. I only just spotted the post!

These were my weekend project - freeze some holly into a jug of water then shoot the results.

Was a chance to try figure out the dark art of using my flashgun, and i'm quite pleased with the results.

Shot with D5300 and Tamron 70-300 macro lens, with Sigma flash. Light was diffused and bounced using a softbox and reflector placed behind subject.

Iso 100, shutter 1/200 and approx f7.1 

heres my take on the shot. Really nice image, by the way!

i felt it needed lots of light- and the exposure was quite dark obviously because of shooting into the sun. 

In LR i added 2 stops of exposure, dropped the highlights and the white levels, and boosted the shadows. A bit of clarity and just a touch of Vibrance helped sharpen it.  Gave it a medium contrast tone curve.

Also used the lens correction to help remove distortions and after that i used the vignette to add a touch of shade to the corners.

Boosted the yellows with a brush adjustment that lifted the highlights on the flowers, and also darken the stems on the left shadowy side, and finally dropped the exposure on the road so it wasnt so overpowering.

Also used a grad filter on the sky but only adjusting the white balance slightly toward yellow just to remove some of the blue from the clouds.

adam

you can also use DaVinci Resolve from blackmagicdesign.com. Its a free download but is a fully functioning broadcast edit and colour grading application. Its also Mac /PC compatible.

looking at the image you posted, if that is a screengrab of your output settings, then there a quite a few changes that would improve things.

Its set to export the same format as the timeline, yet if the timeline has automatically been set to the import format, then you won't see any benefit - the export just copies the import. Change the timeline to the format you want to edit with then import the footage into it. It looks like you are exporting an mpeg. You don't want to use mpeg as an edit format - its usually just  final delivery format.

When exporting, you havent changed any of the quality settings. I can see the quality is set to 50%, and the render maximum quality button has been left unchecked .

Also worth bearing in mind - if you have Adobe CC then you will have access to Adobe Media Encoder, which is a dedicated video format conversion tool and will allow you to convert to a huge amount of video formats. It uses a similar layout to the export page you showed.

All Adobes video tools tend to use a similar underlying architecture, and as such if its anything like After Effects, it will be using an adaptive resolution system which allows the computer to respond quicker by showing a reduced quality depending upon what you are doing at any particular time. You can usually switch this off, but if your computer is not the fastest around, it may struggle. I assume Premiere uses a similar system, and to allow it to work on the compressed h264 with any degree of responsiveness its probably showing a lower quality that is present in the file.

A little rider - i don't edit with Premiere myself (i edit professionally using Autodesk Smoke, and FCP before that) but it is a very powerful tool and should be able to create the formats you require. 

good luck.

Adam