Color Management overview

Learn about Color Management in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Color Management in Premiere Pro makes it easier to use wide-gamut camera raw and log-encoded media, simpler to output a program to multiple formats, and faster to achieve great color.

The Color Management system supports RAW and log formats from the most popular cameras. It 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.

Color Management in Premiere Pro also allows users to use a wide gamut working color space in three wide gamut presets for better-looking results.

Overview of Color Management features

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. Thus, 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 previous Premiere Pro color workflows 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.

When Color Management is turned on, Premiere Pro automatically color manages camera raw media, including Apple, ARRI, Canon, RED, and Sony raw media formats. If 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 supports most commonly used color spaces for supported cameras and formats, making it easy 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, the 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 the 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 with which 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 to create multiple deliverables using the same grade (For example, delivering both HDR and SDR versions of the same sequence).

The Source Monitor provides a Monitor Color Management submenu in the wrench menu that provides different options for showing your source media. By default, the gang to Active Sequence Color Management setting lets you preview how media in the Source Monitor looks using the Color Management settings of the sequence that currently appears in the Program Monitor. 

Improved tone mapping algorithms and Gamut Compression settings improve quality when automatically converting wide-gamut source media to standard dynamic range. Additionally, there are two ways of using tone mapping, on input and on output.

The functionality of the Auto Detect Log Video Color Space setting, renamed Color Manage Auto Detected Log and Raw Media, reflects the enhanced Color Management capabilities.

Premiere Pro Color Management has been improved to enable smoother interoperability and color consistency when using Dynamic Link to round-trip 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 the same as before, while the Color Management will function the same as before. If you want to override these legacy settings and use Color Management, you can override the Custom Settings the sequence was set up with and choose a different Color Management preset or undo if desired.