Colour grading and Directional Blur

Now that my final edit is finally done, it is time to colour grade my work and make the whole piece look a lot more cohesive and aesthetically pleasing. Some of the darker shots definitely had to be touched up with brightness and contrast because once I tried to export the final edit, those shots looked a lot darker once exported than they did whilst I was editing them in Premiere Pro. For the main colours I wanted the video to look very soft and bright and really accentuate the sun in the brighter shots. To do this I flicked through some of the Pre-sets on the Premiere Pro Lumetri Colour option to find a good base, and I settled on 'KODAK 5218 KODAK 2395 (by Adobe)'. I then adjusted the hue, saturation, sharpness etc. on each of the shots until I was happy with how each one turned out. Here are some before and after shots of the raw footage against my edit. 

I was quite inspired by the music video for 'Say So' by Doja Cat where the video has this glittery and sparkly effect at times and I wanted to recreate this for my own video.

To do this effect, I found a tutorial on YouTube. 

It's quite simple. You have to duplicate your video two times and insert them above each other in your timeline, then add the Directional Blur video effect onto both of the layers, set the Blend Mode to 'Lighten', change the direction of the blur to +45 to one layer and -45 to the other, and then set the blur amount to whatever you want. The higher the blur means a lot more, well, blur (and sparkles) and the less blur means a lot more of a subtle look. You can crank the setting all the way up but I feel that looses it's effect, so I wanted a more subtle approach to be honest. Here is some comparison where the blur length is set to 17 and then to 6 (my final look) against the raw footage.

I really like this effect and I think it could be really fun to play around with, but I want my video to remain a little more professional so I toned things down for the final product.