Color management system in Premiere Pro

Color management in Premiere Pro has been radically improved, making it easier to use wide-gamut camera raw and log-encoded media, simpler to output to multiple formats, and faster to achieve great color.

Supporting RAW and log formats from nearly every camera, this new color management system automatically transforms your raw and log media to the color space of your choice with high-fidelity tone mapping, enabling higher-quality image processing, improved video monitoring, and better sequence export.

New color management in Premiere Pro also provides users with the option of using a wide gamut working color space in three of our new color management "wide gamut" presets for even better-looking results.

Overview of color management improvements

• Each sequence’s color management is easily configurable from the Color Setup menu found within the Color tab that’s available when creating a new sequence, or in the Settings tab of your Lumetri Color panel, so you can make real-time color management adjustments and see the result in your program monitor without having to switch back and forth between your timeline and your settings. By default, color management works similarly to the Premiere Pro color workflows already used to when using the default Direct Rec.709 (SDR) preset. Alternatively, you can choose to use one of the wide-gamut color processing presets to maximize the image quality of all grading and timeline effects when using wide-gamut or wide-latitude source media. Regardless, Lumetri and other effects have been made color space aware so they work well in any preset. 
• You can turn off automated color management from within the Color Setup menu. This is useful for pass-through workflows when you don’t want the color space of media processed at all or when engaging in traditional display-referred grading workflows using LUTs and manual adjustments.
  
• Premiere Pro now automatically color manages camera raw media, including Apple, ARRI, Canon, RED, and Sony raw media formats. As long as color management is enabled, raw clips will be automatically processed and converted to your output color space of choice. 
  
• The Override Media Color Space menu has been expanded to support even more color spaces for more cameras and formats, making it easier than ever to color manage media that were either recorded or transcoded to standard file formats such as QuickTime and MXF without needing to track down the right input LUT. 
  
• For clips you don’t want to be automatically color managed, a new Preserve RGB setting in the Color tab of the Modify Clip dialog prevents input to working color space conversions, allowing you to manually convert clips either using LUTs or manual filter adjustments.
  
• The Program Monitor, Video Scopes, Transmit, and Media Export all output the image as it appears after conversion to a new Output Color Space setting. While the working color space lets you choose how media is processed, the Output Color Space lets you choose the specific color space you want to monitor (SDR, HDR PQ, or HLG) and deliver your program. This guarantees that the working color space never needs to be changed while making it easy to change color spaces at any time in order to create multiple deliverables using the same grade (e.g., delivering both HDR and SDR versions of the same sequence). 
• Improved tone mapping algorithms and new gamut compression settings improve quality when automatically converting wide-gamut source media to standard dynamic range. Additionally, there are now two ways of using tone mapping, on input or on output, described in the next section of this document. 
• Premiere Pro color management has been improved to enable smoother interoperability and color consistency using Dynamic Link for round-tripping color managed sequence clips between Premiere Pro and After Effects whenever you use the Replace with After Effects composition command.
• If you import projects and sequences created in older versions of Premiere Pro that have grading and effects already applied, these will automatically be configured to appear exactly the same as before, while the color management will function exactly the same as before. If you want to override these legacy settings and use the new color management, you can override the custom settings the sequence was set up with and choose a different color management preset (and you can use Undo if you find this was a mistake). 
  

How color management works

Color management automatically turns the color and contrast of the source media you import into your project into the output you want when monitoring and rendering your edited sequences. 

Color management automatically converts the color space of every source clip you edit into a sequence to that sequence’s working color space, in which all effects and color adjustments are applied. Then, the entire sequence is converted to an output color space for monitoring and export. In the process, tone mapping may or may not be used to automatically compress highlight and shadow detail that might otherwise be clipped or distorted in order to help convert wide gamut source media (such as camera raw media) to narrow gamut output formats (such as Rec.709) without you needing to do anything.

The first transformation from the Input Color Space to the Working color space and the second transformation from the Working Color Space to the Output Color Space are at the heart of color management.

COLOR MANAGEMENT STARTS WITH SOURCE MEDIA 

Color management only works when the color space of each clip that’s used in the program is correctly identified. Premiere Pro can read available metadata in formats such as QuickTime, MXF, MP4, and select camera raw formats to automatically tag the color space of various media formats. If clips lack such metadata or have incorrect metadata, you can use Modify Clip > Color to verify whether or not your media is correctly tagged and change any clips that aren’t being correctly tagged. 

COLOR MANAGEMENT IS CONFIGURED WITHIN SEQUENCES 

Whenever you create a new empty sequence, you have the opportunity to configure how that sequence will color manage the media you edit into it. Each sequence in your project can have its own color management settings, giving you the flexibility to accommodate multiple color workflows within the same project. Each sequence's color management settings govern how clips will appear when you edit them into that sequence and how they'll be output from that sequence during export. These settings are easily configured using the Color Management tab in the New Sequence dialog.

After a sequence's creation, you can still modify a sequence's color management settings at any time using the Color tab in the Sequence Settings dialog or in the Sequence section of the Lumetri panel's Settings tab.

The default color management preset enables SDR color processing in the Rec.709 color space, input tone mapping to fit wide gamut source media into Rec.709, and Rec.709 output. This is a good preset for programs that consist mostly of SDR source media when you want to work similarly to how Premiere Pro has in the past.

It's also easy to choose other color management workflows by choosing one of the other provided presets that’s more appropriate for the kind of media you’re working with. For example, if you’re editing primarily camera raw source media, you might choose Wide Gamut (Tone Mapped) from the Color Setup menu of the Color Management tab, which will set up Premiere Pro color management to work in the ACEScct wide gamut color space, use output tone mapping to fit wide gamut media into the output color space you choose, and defaults to Rec.709 output (though you can change this at any time). This gives you more latitude for making color adjustments and guarantees the highest quality by only tone mapping after all image effects and color adjustments have been made, keeping all highlight and shadow detail retrievable at full quality. 

If your program has special requirements that aren’t met by any of the available color management presets, all parameters governing how automated color management works are available within the advanced group of controls, so you can customize color management in Premiere Pro to work however you need it to.

MONITORING AND EXPORT DEPEND ON THE OUTPUT COLOR SPACE 

Each sequence’s Output Color Space controls the color that the sequence produces in the Program Monitor, to video output via Transmit, or that is rendered for export.

• Any time you choose a color management preset, an Output Color Space that’s most typically associated with that preset is automatically assigned. However, you can change the Output Color Space whenever you want, independently of the preset. This lets you output any sequence to any supported format, depending on your needs. 
  
• Every color management preset that ships with Premiere Pro defaults to Rec.709 output, as that’s by far the most common output. However, to output to any other SDR or HDR color space, you can access the color parameters in the Sequence Settings or the Lumetri Settings panel and change the Output Color Space to whatever you need to deliver. Color management in Premiere Pro automatically does everything necessary to convert your sequence to the output color space to ensure the image is output correctly.
  
• When you’re exporting your sequence out to a video file, if the Format or Bit Depth you’ve selected isn't compatible with the Output Color Space of the current sequence, then an Export Color Space might be assigned to convert to a color space that can be exported. If this happens, you’ll see a warning, and you can either change to a supported format or increase the bit depth if you want to export to the Output Color Space you chose.

TONE MAPPING AND GAMUT COMPRESSION SPEED up your WORKFLOW 

Camera raw and log-encoded media have so much more latitude and color than can be typically output for local monitoring or distribution via streaming or broadcast; it’s necessary to either clip out-of-range values (which looks ugly) or compress out-of-range values into the viewable range of your display. While this can be done manually, tone mapping makes it faster to compress wider latitude into the signal range you choose, while gamut compression makes it faster to compress a wider range of color into the signal range you choose.

No matter how you decide to work, either using the default SDR image processing preset or one of the optional wide gamut image processing presets, tone mapping and gamut compression are available to speed up your workflow in the following ways: 

• Input tone mapping and Input gamut compression are applied during the initial input to working color space conversion, which means that image conversion happens before imaging effects are applied. This can simplify SDR workflows, at the expense of occasionally making it difficult to retrieve highlight detail that ends up overly compressed. Also, because they’re clip-specific, these operations can be customized on a clip-by-clip basis.

• Output tone mapping and Output gamut compression are applied after all effects are processed, as part of the working to output color space conversion. For wide-gamut workflows, this guarantees that the color adjustments you make with Lumetri are of the highest quality and that all highlight and shadow detail available in your source media will be retrievable. Since these operations are applied on output, there can be only one setting for any sequence, which guarantees that all clips being composited together are tone-mapped identically.

Tone mapping and gamut conversion are optional. You can turn them off at any time. However, when you do so, all out-of-range highlights and shadows will be clipped rather than compressed, and bright parts of the image will appear harsh unless you make some kind of manual adjustment to deal with these levels.

Lastly, there are different tone mapping and gamut compression algorithms that produce slightly different outputs based on the range of color and contrast you have in a given image. Because the quality of these operations is subjective, and different algorithms may produce more pleasing results depending on the media and your preferences, you have a range of choices. However, the defaults have been chosen as they give generally good results with the widest variety of media.

DISABLING PREMIERE PRO COLOR MANAGEMENT 

You can turn all color management off by choosing Disable Color Management from the Color Setup menu of the Color Management tab in either the Sequence Settings or New Sequence dialogs or in the Sequence controls of the Lumetri panel's Settings tab. This disables both the automated input to working color space conversion and the automated working to output color space conversion. When you do this, all media is considered to be in the Rec.709 color space so that things work as they did before color management was added to Premiere Pro.

This is primarily useful in two situations:

• When you’re using Premiere Pro to do a total pass-through workflow where you don’t want the color space of the media you’re importing and exporting to be altered at all.

• When you’re doing a completely manual workflow where you’re using input LUTs to transform clips to the working color space, and you’re making manual color adjustments using Lumetri or other effects to do color correction in a traditional display-referred workflow.

WHY DO CLIPS IN THE SOURCE MONITOR LOOK DIFFERENT THAN CLIPS IN THE PROGRAM MONITOR? 

For maximum flexibility, color management is configured and applied at the sequence level, so clips aren’t color-managed until they’re edited into a sequence. This is why you can have multiple versions of a program, each with different color settings, all in the same project.

This also means that when you open a clip in the Source Monitor, you view the source color. It may look strange when a source clip in the Source Monitor is right next to the same clip edited into a sequence in the Program Monitor, but that's because you're seeing the clip's source color next to the sequence's final color management.

How to configure color management

Learn more about setting up, customizing, and using every feature that Premiere Pro color management makes available for automatically color managing each sequence.

Configuring clips using Clip Modify

Clips are often automatically identified, but if they’re not because they either lack metadata, have incorrect metadata, or have metadata that Premiere Pro isn't able to read, you can manually choose which color space each clip uses. The following procedures let you identify each clip in your project for color management differently. 

To ensure each clip is correctly identified once it’s been imported:

• To access the source clip settings, do the following:

To use an input LUT to convert a clip to a known color space for automatic conversion to the working color space: 

Premiere Pro color management will now convert the output of the LUT conversion using the selected input color space to the working color space. 

configuring sequence color management 

Each sequence’s color settings enable you to customize color management to meet your needs. Each sequence can have different color management settings for different deliverables. For example, you can duplicate a sequence you’ve adjusted the color of and change the Output color space of the duplicate to change the output format to create another deliverable.

When you make a new sequence by default it’s set to Broadcast 709 (SDR) color setup preset, and the Output color space defaults to Rec.709. If you want to work differently, changing presets is the easiest way to reconfigure a sequence’s color management settings for other workflows.

To change color setup presets for a new or existing sequence, do the following: 

Creating your own custom color management workflow using the Advanced controls—The available Color Management options should work for most projects. Still, if you have a specific workflow, these settings let you customize how color management works for a particular sequence.  

Customize color setup presets for a new or existing sequences

CONFIGURING A SEQUENCE’S OUTPUT COLOR SPACE

For any sequence, the output color space defines the color space you want to monitor (either via the program monitor and internal video scopes or via Transmit) and render to. Every program has specific requirements for which format it needs to be output to, either imposed by the client, by the streaming service you’re uploading to, by a distribution company, or by a broadcast organization. Color management helps you to meet this requirement in a world where HDR and SDR deliverables are both regularly requested.

If you use an external display connected to a Transmit-compatible video output interface, the best practice is for your external display to be set to match your sequence’s output color space. 

Unlike the working color space, which should never be changed once you’ve started adding visual effects and color adjustments to the sequence, you can change the output color space any time you want.

To customize your output color space, do the following:

Color Management options in the Project Settings

These settings affect every sequence in your project, although some can be overridden if necessary.

• Default graphics white—Sets what level of white is used by generated text and graphics in HDR programs. Sequences can be set to have independent settings from the project. This defaults to 100 nits for SDR programs.
• Enable Color Space Aware Effects—Enables effects in Premiere Pro to work correctly no matter what the working color space is set to. When disabled, all effects assume the color space to be Rec.709, as in previous versions of Premiere Pro. This setting is turned off when you import projects and sequences from older versions of Premiere Pro in order to present the same color as before.
  

Color management options

Here are the specific options that are available in the updated Premiere Pro color management system.

New input color space settings

Premiere Pro Color Management adds compatibility with the following input color spaces for media in formats including QuickTime, MXF, XAVC, R3D, MP4, CRM, and ARI. 

Supported RAW Camera Formats

Premiere Pro color management now automatically handles media in supported raw camera formats as well. Since camera raw media has the most reliable metadata for communicating color space information, this makes camera raw media one of the best ways of working in a color managed way.

Supported formats include:

• Apple ProRes Raw
• ARRI 
• Canon
• RED 
• Sony

Tone Mapping options

Tone mapping is a method of modifying the dynamic range of a video signal. As implemented in Premiere Pro color management, it compresses the highlights to automatically convert wide gamut, extended, or high dynamic range (HDR) media to the narrower dynamic range of SDR (standard dynamic range) so that the result appears perceptually similar to the original.

Different algorithms do this differently and may exhibit different results with clips that have exceptionally bright highlights or high saturation in the highlights. While the Hue Preservation algorithm is one of the best all-around algorithms (and is also the most flexible with an adjustable knee), the By Channel and Max RGB algorithms are provided for content that exhibits unwanted color shifts or other noticeable issues in the highlights for media in your sequence.

All of these algorithms can be used either for input tone mapping or output tone mapping (found in the Advanced section of controls in the Color tab of the Sequence Settings). On input, individual clips can use different tone mapping algorithms, but tone mapping is applied before effects and color adjustments are applied, which may make some highlight details irretrievable if you need to make corrections to the result. On output, all effects and color adjustments happen prior to tone mapping, but you apply a single tone mapping algorithm to the entire sequence.

The available tone mapping algorithms are:

• By Channel—This option has been available previously. It produces a smoothly tone-mapped result but can slightly darken the image as a result. It does a good job of avoiding awkward-looking saturation in the highlights of wide gamut sources with exceptionally saturated color in the brightest highlights, but it can produce highlights in other media that may appear somewhat desaturated. 
  • Highlight Saturation—This setting lets you fine-tune how much saturation is allowable in the highlights of the tone-mapped result. It defaults to 0.5, which is good for many images. Lowering this setting can produce results similar to those of the By Channel algorithm. 
• Max RGB—This option has been available previously. It produces a smoothly tone-mapped result, but can slightly darken the image as a result while maintaining more saturation in the highlights than By Channel.
  • Highlight Saturation—Lets you fine-tune how much saturation is allowable in the highlights of the tone mapped result. It defaults to 0.5 which is good for many images. Lowering this setting can produce results that are similar to the By Channel algorithm.
    
• Hue Preservation (Adjustable Knee)—The default selection is more customizable than the other options with two adjustable parameters. This option works well with a wide variety of media and usually does a better job of maintaining brightness than By Channel or Max RGB. On the other hand, some images that Hue Preservation doesn’t handle well may appear better using By Channel. 
  • Highlight Saturation—Lets you fine-tune how much saturation is allowable in the highlights of the tone-mapped result. It defaults to 0.5, which is good for many images. Lowering this setting can produce results similar to those of the By Channel algorithm.
  • Knee—Lets you set the threshold below which the image is not affected by tone mapping of the highlights. Raising this threshold protects more of the image, but results in tone mapping that may appear less smooth depending on your media.

Gamut Compression options 

Analogous to tone mapping, gamut compression is a method of fitting a larger gamut (or range of color) into a smaller gamut by compressing it so the result appears perceptually similar to the original. If your wide gamut source media doesn’t have saturated highlights, then Gamut compression won’t result in visible differences. However, wide gamut source media with saturated highlights will look considerably improved when you use gamut compression along with tone mapping to automatically convert wide gamut, extended, or high dynamic range media to the narrower dynamic range of SDR. SDR clips will be completely unaffected by these gamut compression settings. 

The available gamut compression options are:

• Luminance Preserving—The default option that preserves brighter colors at the expense of desaturating them to bring them into the gamut.
• Saturation Preserving—This option preserves highly saturated colors by darkening them. Highlights may diminish as a result.

Color space aware effects

A subset of all effects in Premiere Pro can sometimes produce a different result in one working color space versus another or be harder or easier to adjust based on your working color space. For some of these, the difference may be visible; for others, the difference may be so subtle as to be indistinguishable. An ongoing effort to make all such effect color space aware is underway, and this section lists the progress that’s been made. 

The current list of color space aware effects includes: 

 Lumetri improvements

The following improvements have been made to Lumetri:  

LUMETRI IS COLOR SPACE AWARE 

No matter which color management preset or working color space you choose to use in your sequence, the various controls within Lumetri should feel familiar and work similarly to the way they always have so that the kinds of adjustments you’re used to making should continue to feel right. This also means that grading a sequence being output to SDR should feel almost the same as grading a sequence being output to HDR. That said, it’s important to keep in mind that the adjustments you make in Lumetri will still be color space specific, and adjustments made within one sequence’s working color space will look different if you copy them to a clip in another sequence that uses a different working color space. This is to be expected and is the reason why you should never change the working color space of a sequence once you’ve made color adjustments.

If you save a Lumetri preset, note which color space it was meant to work within in the name of the preset, so you know in the future which color space that grade was meant to work within. 

LOOK LUT APPLICATION IS COLOR SPACE AWARE 

The Look drop-down menu in the Creative section of the Lumetri panel has been made color space aware. Every LUT is created to transform images that are in a particular color space. For example, many “look LUTs” have been made to make images that are Rec.709 have a particular style, such as a film look. Other LUTs are intended to transform images that are in one color space into another color space. Now that the default working color space is a wide gamut, it’s necessary to choose which color space your LUTs were designed for. For example, the default LUTs that appear in the Look drop-down were all designed to work in Rec.709, so for these LUTs to appear correctly, you need to choose Rec.709 (scene) from the Color Space menu.

Premiere Pro and After Effects compatibility

The new color management in Premiere Pro enables smoother interoperability and color consistency for sequence clips round-tripping between Premiere Pro and After Effects whenever you use Replace with After Effects composition.

As you work, keep the following in mind:

• Premiere Pro—After Effects interoperability works with every media format (except some still formats like PNG, TIFF, EXR, and JPEG, in which cases you might not see color consistency to the exact same level) supported in Premiere Pro, with every available sequence working color space. 
• If you have used Override Media Color Space or Preserve RGB in the Premiere Pro sequence, they will be passed to the After Effects composition.
• If you have applied a LUT to a clip in Premiere Pro via Lumetri, that LUT will be passed to the After Effects composition. If you have applied LUT via Modify > Color, then the LUT will not be passed to the After Effects composition.
• If you have applied Input tone mapping or Input Gamut compression to clip in Premiere Pro, then these settings will be passed to the After Effects composition. If you have applied Output tone mapping or Output Gamut compression to clip in Premiere Pro, then these settings will not be passed to the After Effects composition.
  
• If you have After Effects open with a project having different color settings compared to Premiere Pro sequence, and then you choose the Replace with After Effects composition option, whether or not you get consistent clip color depends on the color space of your Premiere Pro sequence and the project settings of the currently open After Effects project. If the two don't match, you’ll receive a warning. 
  

• Improvements to color consistency in the outputs sent to Adobe Media Encoder for rendering from After Effects have also been made.
  

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