Display color management

Color management helps you to achieve consistent color among digital cameras, scanners, and computer monitors. Each of these devices reproduces a different range of colors, called a color gamut.

As you move media from your digital camera to your monitor, the colors shift. This shift occurs because every device has a different color gamut and thus reproduces the colors differently.  For example, the colors on one frame of a video appear the same on a computer LCD monitor and a plasma screen. All the colors may not match exactly because each device has a different range of color intensities. Color management translates the media colors so that each device can reproduce them in the same way. 

Set up color management

Now you can also access Preferences under Lumetri Color settings which were earlier only accessible through Premiere Pro (Beta) > Settings > Color.

If Enable Display Color Management (requires GPU acceleration) is dimmed, do the following:

Effect of color management on a project

Premiere Pro uses television broadcast standards, while macOS uses a less common standard. You now have the option to choose how video is displayed in Premiere Pro.

The Settings tab of the Lumetri Color panel now has a Viewer Gamma option, enabling you to choose either the broadcast standard 2.4 gamma or the macOS 1.96 gamma.

For native Rec.709 video, this feature will work anywhere in the application where the video is displayed, like the Source Monitor and the Program Monitor. For video that is color managed (for example, log video where the color space is auto-detected and then tone mapped into Rec.709), Viewer Gamma will affect how the video is displayed only in the Program Monitor.

When is color management useful?

Display color management isn't required if your monitor (display) color spaces match with the timeline color space, e.g., a user working with properly calibrated (Rec. 709) may keep it disabled.

Use the following table for guidance on when to enable Display Color Management.

Display Color Management works for both internal and secondary computer monitors used as part of the OS desktop. It shows the accurate colors and contrast that are required for your display to be calibrated or characterized.

Effects of Display Color Management on sRGB based display

Most computer screens are sRGB. Some newer displays are P3 (like the iMac Retina displays and HP’s DreamColor displays) or some other wide gamut color space.

Broadcast Monitors are Rec. 709. Some displays, like the DreamColor displays from HP, can show multiple standards: sRGB, Rec. 709, P3.

Most people edit on sRGB because it is a common monitor. It is problematic because most videos are Rec. 709. Enabling color management makes the Rec. 709 video appear closer than a broadcast monitor. There is also loss of quality in the display.

Most sRGB displays are only 8 bit, so the 19 lowest 8-bit Rec. 709 code values are crushed into the 7 lowest 8-bit sRGB values. 8-bit Rec. 709 codes, 0-6, are mapped to 8-bit sRGB 0 (if rounded to nearest).

Some video cards use floor instead of round, so:

• 8-bit Rec. 709 codes 0-8 are mapped to 8-bit sRGB 0 (using floor instead of round).
• The 78 lowest 10-bit Rec. 709 code values are crushed into the 8 lowest 8-bit sRGB values.
• 10-bit Rec. 709 codes 0-26 are mapped to 8-bit sRGB 0 (if rounded to nearest).
• 10-bit Rec. 709 codes 0-35 are mapped to 8-bit sRGB 0 (using floor instead of round).

Many displays are “sRGB-in-name-only”, SINO. Although calibrated to sRGB, a SINO display can be off target, since most calibration tools take few samples. So, a SINO display shows fewer details than what is represented in a sRGB encoding.

Here are screen grabs from an sRGB monitor, showing Rec. 709 video with Display Color Management enabled and disabled. The difference is in the shadows and saturation.

Video: Displaying color management in Premiere Pro

Watch this tutorial to understand how to set up color management in Premiere Pro on macOS and Windows.

Viewing time: 7 minutes.

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