1. Enable Display Color Management Premiere Pro 2020
2. Color Management Workflow

Enable Display Color Management. When this option is turned on, Premiere Pro reads the ICC profile selected in your operating system and does a conversion to display colors perfectly on the monitor. This feature applies to the Premiere Pro Program and Source monitors, thumbnail previews in the Project panel, Media browser in Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro CC 2019 What does the Enable Display Color Management option do? The new release of Premiere Pro CC includes an option on the Edit/Preferences/General tab “Enable Display Color Management”, as shown below. Aug 16, 2019 I calibrated my monitors (Spyder5) and installed the custom ICC profiles into my O/S. So logically, what I'm seeing on the screen now are the correct colors. In PPro Preferences, I'm assuming that I should leave the 'Enable Display Color Management' Un-Checked, because I don't need PPro adjusting. At its default settings, Adobe After Effects ignores color management. Which means if you bring in HDTV video footage and Adobe RGB still images, one or both are not going to be interpreted correctly, meaning you’re going to be compositing together colors different than what the original shooter or editor intended. Color management in Premiere Pro affects a project by displaying colors correctly while using a gamut P3 display and a sRGB display. Color management does not correct the color.

[Click] to play What’s new video

We’ve been busy working on a host of new features in CC2019 as part of our customer feedback. Please keep the feature requests coming . If you are new to submitting request you can find the Provide Feedback link under the Help menu in Premiere Pro and most Adobe apps.

Click on the image below to fill out feedback and feature request.

NEW Display Color Management

One thing that’s been missing from Premiere Pro for a long time is Display Color Management. See the above screenshot showing that Premiere Pro Program Monitor and the After Effects Composition now match in CC2019.

With new Display Color Management turned on you can leave your OS colors settings set to the system default and your colors will be presented correctly on-screen while working in Premiere Pro. Color information of your source files is not modified and will export correctly.

Display Color Management works for any internal monitor and for any secondary computer monitor used as part of the OS desktop, including HDMI, Display Port, DVI, and Thunderbolt connected displays.

Display Color Management does not support external monitors connected through video I/O cards using Mercury Transmit. These need to be configured outside of Premiere Pro.

Enable Display Color Management by opening Preferences > General > and check “Enable Display Color Management.” The preference is off by default since not all systems have sufficient GPU horsepower to use the feature.

** Note** we are just at the beginning of where we want to take Color Management and this just a first step. Stay tuned for future updates on this critical workflow topic.

NEW Selective Color Grading

We’ve been working on a new advanced Curves interface to help take the guess work out of working with Curves with Hue, Sat and Luma settings. Trust me, it’s pretty easy to see where you are pulling or pushing the color .

Selective Color Grading provides five new curve adjustment tools. The first one, Hue vs Saturation, replaces the radial “donut” and presents the same controls as a horizontal curve line.

Use the eyedropper to select a color range in your image, or manually add adjustment points as needed to manipulate the curve. A scroll bar at the bottom of the window make it easy to work on any part of the line (essentially, dialing around the color wheel.)

Hue vs Saturation
Select a Hue range and adjust the saturation level. As you drag your selection up or down, a vertical line appears and displays the saturation levels available – giving you visual guidance as you adjust.

Hue vs Hue
Select a Hue range and change it to another hue – essentially you are modifying a color range, to make it stand out more (or less) or to distinguish it from other color ranges in the image. Again, the vertical adjustment line provides a visual guide as you make the adjustment.

Hue vs Luma
Select a Hue (color) range and adjust the Luma (light). You could use this, for example, to darken a pale blue sky and add more contrast or drama to a shot

Luma vs Sat
Select a Luma range and adjust the saturation, for example to roll off the saturation in the highlight of a sunset and minimize clipping in the center of the sun which is over-exposed

Sat vs Sat
This allows you to selectively adjust saturation for a specific saturation range. For example: to ensure broadcast legal saturation levels.

NEW Support for Data Driven Graphics from AE

In After Effects CC2018 we added new support for Data Driven Graphics which allows you to use CSV and TSV files from programs like Microsoft Excel when creating Motion Graphics Templates (mogrts) . After Effects can use the data to control keyframes to control the animation, color via Hex Values, and more. New in Premiere Pro is the ability to use those After Effects Motion Graphics Templates . You can have enter data manually or you can link the data to spreadsheet and whenever the spreadsheet is updated, the template will auto update. Again, it’s a game changer for both AE and Premiere Pro users.

NEW Audio Filters for Essential Sound Panel

Our Audition team has been busy listening to feedback from customers using the Essential Sound Panel in Premiere Pro and Audition. The 2 most popular request were to improve the Reduce Noise and Reduce Reverb results when using the sliders. Both of have been updated to use new filters for better results.

We are continuing to support our fast growing VR community with new support for VR 180 cameras and workflow. Premiere Pro can now automatically recognize many of the new 180 cameras now on the market. We have also updated our effects to take advantage of the new format. VR 180 is quickly becoming the new Stereo 3D but without the glasses.

Enginering Notes:

New Feature Recap & Bug Fixes …

New Features in Premiere Pro 13.0

• Selective color grading
• Display color management
• Add, rename, edit Lumetri instances
• Open Premiere Rush projects in Premiere Pro
• Intelligent audio cleanup
• Edit and transform vector graphics
• Essential Graphics and Motion Graphics Template enhancements
  • Support for data-driven infographics
  • Improved search for Motion Graphics templates in Adobe Stock
• VR enhancements
  • End-to-end workflow for 180 VR
  • Spatial markers for immersive media
  • New Theater mode in Adobe Immersive Environment
• Collaboration enhancements
  • Group invites for Team Projects
  • Creative Cloud Libraries enhancements
• Performance enhancement and file format support
  • New file format support
  • Support for Australian Closed captioning standard
  • Performance improvements
• New Home Screen
• Auto-save improvements
• Quick Timecode entry
• And more

Bug Fixes in Premiere Pro 13.0

Performance

• Improved Mercury Playback Engine performance on Metal
• Improved Reverse Playback performance of HEVC file
• Improved Metal renderer performance at Full Res playback
• Lumetri: Performance drop/dropped frames with interlaced media (GPU)
• 8K R3D playback performance issues at Full and half resolution (macOS)

Stability

• Intel Coffee Lake CPU – crash when importing or opening an existing project while NVIDIA driver is enabled.
• Crash can occur when going backwards in Learn panel
• Crash when switching to Thumbnail view with PNG files
• Recovery clips are created when working with multiple open projects
• Import reference file for some audio (e.g.: AIFF, MOV) results in low-level exception in Importer MPEG
• Slow import of multiple AVCHD files on macOS
• Crash when switching between Workspaces viewing Waveform Luma & RGB Alignment in Lumetri Scope
• Stability issues with laptops with discrete GPU running Windows 10
• Crash when quitting if “Manage My Account’ link is open in that session
• Several redrawing errors, crash and blank screen while changing workspaces using Workspace tabs
• Crash when importing XDCAM files from Nexio/Harris Velocity
• Crash when using “Reveal Project in Project Panel” with some projects
• Reverse nested sequence causes program monitor to display black
• Files generated by YI camera result in low-level exceptions or application stops responding
• Duplicating sequences lose effect data
• After adding a motion effect to clip on timeline, playback will freeze
• Crash occurs when match framing or slip/slide of clips in multicam sequence
• Placing growing MXF file from Abekas into sequence causes Premiere Pro to crash
• Hang when rendering some Timelines
• MP4 material can cause video playback to freeze and the application to stop responding
• Application hangs when importing 100 or more files requiring force quit.
• Importing FCP xml into large project results in a freeze
• Hang while importing some types of GoPro files.
  

Formats

• Some ARRI Alexa Mini files appear incorrectly vertically instead of horizontally.
• HEVC mov files with Codec ID hev1 import as audio only
• Playback does not work when importing ALEXA_LF 3840 x 2160 files
• R3D file plays back distorted in 1/4 resolution or lower playback setting
• When importing Prores422HQ codec mov files on Mac, a slight color shift can occur
• QuickTime files that are out of gamut are shown as being in gamut on Windows
• Open GOP files have artifacts with HW decode
• Some H.264 files with Frame Rate & Original Frame Rate values have switch to software decode
• Imported H.264 10-bit files have shift in color values
• Premiere can’t import 4448×1856 ARRI RAW files and eventually hangs the app.
• Importing some QT files cause the app to hang or crash.
• Subsequent imports of XDCAM HD 422 MOV file will only import audio.
• Some Audio/Video file imports as Video only
• Filmic Pro files import as video only
• 4K Raw files from Sony FS7 import as white screen

Workspaces and Panels

• Issues with Workspaces when opening legacy projects.
• Workspaces don’t save with the project
• Display Timecode is inconsistent when multiple Timeline panels are visible
• Opening a second project opens two project tabs in Project Panel
• Switch to another workspace results in missing some or all of the Project tabs

Editing

• Adding marker to Multi-cam clip causes waveform to disappear
• Clip name in timeline not legible
• File selection is not carried over when switching between Icon and List Views in Project panel
• Marker workflow between Timeline, Source Monitor and Program Monitor panels is broken
• Video and Audio usage dropdown list doesn’t work if any clip is selected in the Project Panel
• Digital distortion in silent areas between clips if used as a track-based compressor
• Drag clips from one project to another project’s sequence loses clip label color
• Moving Clip Between Projects Via Source Monitor loses Label Color
• Reveal in Project, with Bin set to Open in place, results in Bin tab not being selected
• Merged Clips are deleted from a timeline, without a warning, if a smart bin filtering merged clips is deleted.
• Clip marker comments are lost when quitting
• When AJA Capture Settings dialog is set to Control Panel, changes are unsaved.
• Background color of drop zone barely visible when dragging media from finder onto project folder
• Saving multiple open projects that originally had different saved renderers all get saved with current renderer
• Motion Graphic Template does not always relink or indicates that After Effects is required to be installed
• Can’t change camera views of a multi-cam project item in a locked project.
• When AJA io4k is configured to transmit Rec 2020 over HDMI, picture outcome is corrupted
• With Sonnet eGPU device attached to iMac Pro, new timeline creation leads to crash.
• incorrect XMP data leads to missing frames in Source Monitor playback

Captions

• Intermittently lose decoding of CC 608 or 708 in timeline when adding more than one blank caption with ctrl click add caption to timeline
• Unexpected behaviours whern making two blank captions
• Issues with authoring captions on V3 with another captions track is on V2
• Setting I/O point and exporting project with embedded captions strips captions from track (Windows only)
• When import dfxp TTML open caption file and place it on the timeline, characters appear to overlap on the program monitor

Audio

• Media Pending error displays when Audio Input set to non-working device
• Mix down clips to stereo setting deletes track routing when dragging a Sequence to the Source Monitor with Multichannel Master tracks
• Specific AAF files that are exported fail to import on Windows
• Silent Audio Export from Audio Clip at 9000% Speed
• Solo in clip mixer with a clip loaded into the source monitor does not properly reflect the solo state in the mini meters
• Waveforms constantly refresh with large projects when BlackMagic transmit enabled
• Switching cameras on multicam clip in the source monitor does not switch audio unless 3rd party transmit is enabled
• Embed audio for AAF creation strips out the audio file metadata
• There is intermittent Left/right channel bleed and waveforms only display problem areas at certain zoom levels
• Some TS muxed 5.1ch files are imported as stereo.
• Incomplete audio when recording on two tracks
• Audio distortion when using an ASIO sound card, Decklink device, and switching rapidly between Multicam View may lead to hang
• Flattening a multicam audio item will clear any volume adjustment

Export and Render

• Green/pink patches along with horizontal lines are observed while playback of HEVC/H.264 files with Intel Graphics 620
• Error Compiling Movie “Software Render Error” for some 3rd party Plugins
• Warp Stabilizer gives a bad result with interlaced footages
• Certain settings for MPEG2 export result in pixilation
• Red frames when exporting specific projects
• Export of HEVC 4K clip using HW encoding on i9 MacBookPro results in ExporterMPEG_VideoToolbox error
• Analyzing in Background banner appears erroneously when playing a Morph Cut
• Export Range is full instead of limited when exporting HDR content for H.264 and HEVC
• Export failures – caused by Lumetri Render error

Color grading is an advanced video editing technique. It allows you to edit the way colors appear on film in post-production. With color grading, you can make scenes more lifelike, achieve a specific look, or infuse emotion into a scene.

In this three-part tutorial on color grading, we’ll cover everything, from basic fundamentals to advanced techniques. Although this tutorial is based on Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, the process is essentially the same no matter what software you’re using.

Let’s dive into the first episode – color grading fundamentals in Adobe Premiere Pro!

Overview of Color Grading Fundamentals

In this episode of our How To Video series, Nick LaClair, head of video production at SproutVideo, walks us through the basics of color grading in Adobe Premiere. Even if you use a different editing suite for your videos, his thorough guide will still help you optimize your workflow since the basic concepts will carry over.

When Is Color Grading Necessary?

If your video looks a little flat, if you filmed on different cameras, or if you’re recording LOG footage, you’ll probably need to color grade your footage.

Note: LOG footage is desaturated, low-contrast footage that many professional cameras shoot. It is designed to retain the most information in the footage (without losing highlights that are blown out or shadows that are too dark). It is the best way to shoot footage, but it is an intermediary, and needs to be color graded into a final image before it’s ready for viewing.

Usually, color grading is the last step after editing your video down to a final cut. All your other edits should be locked before you get to this stage. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time redoing your tweaks to colors. Depending on the process you use, that could be a lot of time!

How to Color Grade in Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere is best if your color grading needs are minimal. For instance, it can handle tweaks to exposure and color temperature very well.

Applying Lumetri as an Effect

Lumetri is a tool built into Adobe, and can be applied as an effect to the clips you’re editing in the timeline from the Effects list. If you access it in that manner, you’ll use the Effect Controls menu to make changes.

Accessing the Color Grading Workspace in Premiere

Alternatively, you can navigate to Lumetri within Premiere by selecting the Color tab at the top of the screen to bring up the color grading workspace.

Premiere will automatically select the clip under the playhead, and the Lumetri corrections will open on the right hand side of the screen. Then, you’ll want to make sure the Lumetri scopes are also visible on the left.

The waveform scope appears automatically (more on exactly what that is below), but if you right click it, you can open other options as well.

Overview of Lumetri Scopes

There are different scopes available to help you adjust the colors in your video. We’ve covered the three main types available (shown on the left in the image above), with tips for using each one.

Waveform Monitor

The colorful, nebulous graph shown in the top left of the image above is called a waveform. Waveforms are the most reliable tool for adjusting the color of your image because while monitors and settings can vary tremendously, the scope will always be consistent.

The Y axis goes from zero, or pure black, to one hundred, pure white. It shows you how dark or bright different areas of your image are.

The waveform, from left to right, corresponds to your image. In the example below, the bright areas to the left represent a bright area behind the female subject, while the dark areas to the right correspond to the person in the foreground, partially blocking our view.

Seeing the relative brightness of every element in your frame is a powerful tool because gives you precise data on where your picture exists in the space between too-dark and too-bright, and allows you to adjust it within that space.

Parade

The parade scope is shown to the right of the waveform in the image above. This option breaks out the red, green, and blue waveforms of your image so you can evaluate them side-by-side. This is handy when you need to achieve a specific white balance in your image.

Vectorscope

The circular scope below the waveform and the parade scope is called a vectorscope. This scope shows you where your image falls on the color wheel. It’s particularly useful for finding a neutral white point.

Using the Scopes

Each of these scopes will adjust dynamically as you make changes to the brightness, contrast, and white balance in your image. They give you quantitative data to complement how the image looks to you subjectively.

If you have any white elements in your image, you’ll know your color settings are just about right when the red, green and blue waveforms all look equal.

Additional Adjustments

Basic Correction

The Basic Correction section might be more aptly named Major Correction. It contains settings for dramatically changing your visuals.

For starters, you can add a LUT, which stands for Look Up Table. A LUT is essentially a shortcut for adding preconfigured color settings based on the color space in which your footage is shot. For instance, if you shoot LOG footage, a LUT will convert it to full-color, full-contrast footage automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand.

Beyond LUTs, you can tweak the color temperature, hue, exposure, and contrast. You can even use sliders to adjust different areas of luminance in your image. The latter is handy if you have an area that is too bright or too dark in your image.

Creative and Curves

You can also add what are known as Creative looks in the next section. Pick from preconfigured settings, or, create something unique by going with the Custom option. And you can edit curves, which are a more finely controllable way of changing the contrast of your footage.

Color Wheels and Match

Professional colorists use tools built around the concept of these different wheels. They enable minute adjustments to different aspects of the image, and are beyond the purview of this primer in color grading fundamentals in Adobe.

Color Grading Workflows in Premiere

One big advantage of using Adobe Premiere is that you can keep editing your video after you’ve graded your footage. However, there are some drawbacks.

Each of these grades is applied to your clip as an effect. It’s relatively easy to copy the settings from one clip and apply them to other clips. You simply right click the clip you’ve already graded and select copy. Then, select your other clips, right click, and use Paste Attributes to apply those settings to the selected clips.

Color Matching

However, you might find that the exact same color settings don’t work across all the scenes in your video. Lumetri provides convenient tools for correcting that issue. Simply compare the two clips side by side, and use the Color Match tool to achieve a more consistent look.

Applying the new settings to other clips is a little tricky. If you just copy and paste the attributes, as described above, you will be adding one color effect on top of another. This is unlikely to deliver the desired result.

Instead, you have to first remove any existing Lumetri effects from the clips you want to adjust. After doing so, you can then paste the attributes from your color matched clip. Select the clips that have existing Lumetri effects, right click, and select “Remove Attributes”. Be sure the “Effects” option is checked.

Adjustment Layer

The above workflow can admittedly be pretty clunky. Whether or not it’ll work for you largely depends on the complexity of the film you are editing.

Enable Display Color Management Premiere Pro 2020

Another option is to use adjustment layers instead of applying the Lumetri effects directly to your clips. This enables you to cut your adjustment layer to fit only certain clips, and avoid having to copy, paste, adjust, remove, paste… repeatedly. The adjustment layer is the purple layer in the timeline shown in the image below.

Drawbacks to Using Premiere

Color Management Workflow

While you can certainly achieve good results when using Premiere for color grading, it isn’t considered a professional color workflow. The main reason is because Premiere isn’t a “color managed” application. So, what does that mean exactly?

Basically, your footage won’t look the same in Premiere as it does on the web or wherever it’s being shared. This makes achieving a specific end result challenging, since it’s really difficult to compensate for these changes. If you want to know more than that, and really want your head to spin, here is a fun entry point to the rabbit hole on color management in video applications.

Solutions for Color Management

In some cases, getting the color just right really, really matters and the differences between what you see in Premiere and your final output might be too different to make it a viable option for you. Luckily, there are solutions for situations like that.

One potential option is to use a color managed video editing application from the start, such as Final Cut Pro. However, you’re likely to be better off using a purpose-built color grading application, like DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve has more advanced features than Lumetri. More importantly, it enables you to achieve a consistent look no matter how you share your video once it’s finalized. In the upcoming second episode of this three-part series on color grading, we’ll walk you through the round trip workflow of editing in Premiere, color grading in DaVinci, and finalizing your film in Premiere.

Don’t miss the rest of our How To Video series! Each episode covers a key aspect of filmmaking in-depth, and is packed with tips and tricks the pros use to get polished results. Subscribe to our newsletter to get each episode in your inbox, plus other video-focused content, all hot off the presses.

Questions about color grading? Share in the comments below to get Nick’s professional opinion.