Color Profile on Adobe Premiere to Social Media Export

On which devices do you check your color output? What's the range you sample? How many, of what manufacturers and types? That ... all matters.

I tend to "hang" with colorists at NAB and Adobe MAX. Plus I'm a contributing author for a colorist's subscription teaching website. Color and color management is a massive topic of the folks I'm around with at events, and those on the online forums such as LGG that I also frequent.

A rather common misunderstanding among many users is the expectation that any "decent" computer and monitor will naturally show video color correctly. They normally ... won't. (And the newer Apple rigs with the "Display-P3" color space Apple created, and the odd application of video color provided by theApple ColorSync utility ... can't.)

Unless the user takes steps to be certain that the color seen on the monitor is correct, that user can have no idea how accurate the equipment is they are working with.

I run a "reference" monitor that is over $1,000, and supposedly covers 95% of P3 ... well, colorists will tell you that in calibration, you lose color space "size" (volume) ... so unless a monitor is well over 100% of a color space, it cannot possibly be considered accurate for anything even after calibration. I would never think of trying to grade for a professional P3 space such as DCI-P3 for theatrical release. My monitor isn't even close to covering that space adequately. However, it does cover well more than the video sRGB space of standard video Rec.709, which is all that I need.

My monitor is calibrated with an i1 Display Pro puck & software to video sRGB, Rec.709/gamma-2.4/100-nits brightness. Then ... I run a profile to generate graphs by ganging the Lightspace software with Resolve generating color patches. And check the resultant graphs. My monitor, by those graphs, is very tightly controlled within Rec.709 standards. Yet even then, most colorists roll their eyes at considering that a "useful" reference monitor, as there's no way this monitor is even close to the overall uniformity of every flipping pixel across the screen that their Flanders and Eizo rigs are. (Yea, those rigs are beautiful to look at ... )

Well ... I don't deliver broadcast, so I've not spent the several thousand additional dollars for the appropriate monitor for that task. However ... when my stuff has been checked, it would have passed QC for most broadcast needs. Some of the pickiest ones? Maybe not ... but it's darn close.

And out "In The Wild", on the web ... my stuff looks relatively the same as other professionally produced media, because it is produced to the same standards as the other media. Premiere is a very tightly color managed app by engineering design, and that design assumes the user will provide a calibrated Rec.709 monitor for Premier to display images upon. Do so, and ... Premiere will deliver very solid color/tonality. Don't ... and you've no clue whatever what you've got.

Warren's suggestion is actually useful if all of your viewing audience have Apple gear. Which ... is about 10% of the US population, and supposedly about 6% of the world-wide users of devices. The part about viewing on an iPad is perhaps the best part, as many iPads have the best video color reproduction of any Apple devices. Some colorists actually keep a stock of iPads to give to their clients while a project is in production to check the color on. None of the colorists I know grades on a Mac Retina though ... but they're an awesome UI screen for sure. Quite a few colorists are Mac users ... but their reference monitor is still a Flanders, Eizo, high end Sony ... that sort of thing. $5,000 and up for a 32-inch 4k monitor.

And for HDR ... the baseline monitors right now are about $30,000. And no, the new Apple XDR monitor isn't even close to providing a reference-monitor quality for b-cast HDR. Tremendous blooming problems ... among other things. Sadly.

So what is your setup for calibration of your monitor? Are you controlling room lighting properly in the area you do color correction? If you're not, well ... you don't have control of your image to begin with. It takes some work and time to properly setup for decently accurate color. It doesn't just happen by itself.

Neil

Eduardo,

See this response for an answer: https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/quot-why-does-my-footage-look-darker-in-premiere-quot-color-q-a/m-p/4788414

Thanks,
Kevin

This may sound like a joke, but my best suggestion is to edit on an iMac or MacBook Pro and view your social media content on an iPad or iPhone.

That said...

What are you using to calibrate your monitors?  SpectraCal is used by several broadcasters to calibrate their AVIDs, Premiere Pro and After Effects workstations (both Mac and Windows).  Since you're editing for social media, you probably want to calibrate your computer monitor(s) and configure an iOS devcie and an Android device as a reference monitor while you're editing.

What brand color chart are you using when you shoot your videos?  Almost any name brand will do, but be sure to consider purchasing a new one as often as the manufacturer recommends as they are prone to fading over time (usally over a few years).

Lastly, are you exporting to H264?  There may be a slight gamma shift that you need to correct for.  It shouldn't take more than a 0.2 adjustment.