Community Manager

Question

[Released] Now in beta: selectable Viewer Gamma

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 27, 2023
9 replies
22087 views

Edit: This feature is now shipping in Premiere Pro v24. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback while it was in beta!

A common question from Premiere Pro customers on macOS is why exported videos look desaturated and washed out when opened in other applications, like QuickTime Player, Safari and other applications on macOS.

The reason for this is a difference between how Premiere Pro displays video and how macOS displays video. Premiere Pro uses television broadcast standards, while macOS uses a less common standard. An excellent description of this issue is available on Todd Dominey’s website: https://www.todddominey.com/2021/01/24/why-are-videos-washed-out-on-the-mac-exploring-quicktime-gamma-shift/

Premiere Pro Beta v24 offers a simple solution to this issue: providing an option for you 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. (The option is also available in Project Settings, Team Projects Settings, Production Settings, and the Color section of Media Encoder Preferences.)

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.

We would love to get your feedback on this feature!

Feedback

I

inzari masudi

Participating Frequently

I'm currently on verison 22.6.0 for mac, is there a way to fix viewer gamma with this version?!

Fergus H

Author

Community Manager

@inzari masudi This feature is only available to customers using Premiere Pro v24 or higher.

Regards,

Fergus

L

Leonard5EE1

Participant

Thank you!

Just a question, if I edit on a Mac and the primary audience is Youtube, should I use 1.96 gamma, 2.2 or 2.4 ?

W

Warren Heaton10841144

Community Expert

@Leonard5EE1

Primary audience is YouTube: 2.2

Primary audience is Broadcast: 2.4

Primary audience is QuickTime Player: 1.96

r___o__m_a___i__n

Participant

i am actually surprised you guys finally adressed this

all this time i was like....... isnt it like millions of people editing on macbooks everyday that get this issue ?

seemed like such a simple fix

and there was no way i was gonna add this stupid QT compensation LUT for one more year

but thanks you for the fix:) editing on premiere will be a little less painful

G

gianniw27226249

Known Participant

Heyy adobe team, i only downloaded the beta version because of this Feature. First ist seemed to work but now suddenly nothing changes when I toggle between the three options web, broadcast, quicktime. Before i was able to see immediat differences but now? I dont know where the problem is. Is it a bug maybe???

C

Chetan Nanda

Adobe Employee

Hi @gianniw27226249 ,

Please make sure Display Color Management (DCM) is enabled.

DCM is required for this feature to work.

G

gianniw27226249

Known Participant

The problem is that I found out it only works when Color Management is disabled???

GundamVanguard

Known Participant

Could you add the ability to bind the gamma viewer options to hotkeys, or turn color management on/off via a hotkey? I would love the ability to quickly swap between gamma 2.4 and gamma 2.2 viewer settings to give me an idea how my project will look on different displays.

GundamVanguard

Known Participant

Furthering to this, could be get the same feature for secondary monitor previews?

C

Chetan Nanda

Adobe Employee

Hi @GundamVanguard ,

The feature should be working for external monitor attached to MacBook.

Please share the system details and ICC profile being used for external monitor if the feature is not working for you.

Thanks,

S

Sight Seven

Participant

This is a step in the right direction. What about exporting? Davinci Resolve allows you to choose the colorspace like sRGB and gamma during the exporting stage, but it allows for more options such as gamma 2.2, 2.6 etc. Is Premiere going to be limited to only 2 and 2.4 during the project and then no options during exporting?

We do commercial video work for some big brands and deliver for web, so ideally providing a global project setting that gets premiere pro to look like how it would if we were viewing on youtube would be best as this is likely the most common delivery format these days (Web). 99% of people are not using Premiere Pro for broadcast exports.

My tests have shown that VLC shows content exactly the same as inside Premiere Pro because it can read the gamma tags
Youtube or other websites look like what Quicktime shows, which is washed out/desaturated.
I've even transferred a video exported from my Mac Studio and put it on my Windows PC and noticed it still looked washed out, even on YouTube, yet people are saying this is only a Mac issue. So I'm not sure.

The conversion Lut approach that everyone says to do is not a good one obviously, so my solution has been to literally either deliver the project through Davinci Resolve, or to do a few color grade passes and cross reference until I find a good middle ground (More than I'd like for the final result in terms of saturation, but I try to pick the average between everything)

It would obviously be best if all the big companies worked together to make a standard so everyone benefits...

andrewk89256747

Known Participant

I second this 100%

" global project setting that gets premiere pro to look like how it would if we were viewing on youtube would be best as this is likely the most common delivery format these days"

jakew39230329

Known Participant

Finally! Been waiting around 6 years for this feature (Since apple introduced P3 displays)
Seems to be working great so far. Had a few crashes on my latest project, so cant wait until this is released in the main app!
Also noticed I have to change it every time I open an old project. Presume this is so colours dont seem off on older projects, but would be good to be able to set and forget.

Fergus H

Author

Community Manager

Hi Jake,

This is definitely a project setting preference, not an application preference. You do raise a good point 'though about how a customer might want to set a preference that would apply to all new projects. Is that something that would be useful?

Fergus

jakew39230329

Known Participant

Personally i'd like to just set it for all future projects. Because I found the 2.4 setting to crush all black detail on my macs so it's never been useful for me, if I did anything for broadcast I always used a decklink and reference monitor. So I would most likely always leave this on for web work which is the majority of my business.

parker_gibbons

Participant

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY so exciting to see this addressed! looking forward to testing it a bit with some grading this week but right off the bat my thoughts go to if this is a setting that needs to be manually changed by the user ahead of export. the 2 biggest problems with the gamma shift always seemed to be that 1) everything looked great in-app, it wasn't until after viewing the exported file something was off, and 2) it's most frustrating to users who don't know the technical cause of the shift.

i'm hoping with a simple way to change the gamma of the working color space, there can also be ways to Just Choose The Right Thing™️ for users without them having to think about it.

Fergus H

Author

Community Manager

"i'm hoping with a simple way to change the gamma of the working color space, there can also be ways to Just Choose The Right Thing"

Well, we're always open to suggestions (particularly from you Parker!) but I don't think there's a simple answer to this. It's going to depend upon what devices the exported video is going to be viewed on.

andrewk89256747

Known Participant

Wow, this is something I think a lot of people have been wanting for a while! I guess the question now becomes, is this setting only advisable to use if the final export is intended to be distributed online or digitally?

What happens if people are viewing the final export on a non-mac display?

In addition, I would assume that if the final export is meant to be shown television or broadcast, we would still likely want to keep it on the broadcast viewer gamma. Is that right?

Please excuse my lack of proper terminology (if any)

Fergus H

Author

Community Manager

Hi Andrew,

You are spot on: this feature enables you to choose which gamma Premiere Pro will use to display the video but you still need to choose what is most appropriate for the audience watching your video. If the video is mostly going to be watched on macOS devices, changing the viewer gamma to 1.96 makes sense. If not, leaving it on the default is the better choice.

If you haven't read it already, Todd Dominey's blog post provides good information about this.

Regards,

Fergus

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