Color space export premiere

Ok … I work for/with/teach pro colorists. I’ve worked in Premiere and Resolve over a decade each. I’ve lectured on Premiere’s color management and was one of the first invited to the private beta of the new Color Mode in the 27.x version still in beta. So I’ve been around hours of discussions of this by both the top people making color management calibration systems/hardware and the top colorists.

There is no “exactly” correct color capture or presentation on a monitor, anywhere to be found. Period.

Yea, that’s a hard one to grasp. First let’s look at capture.

Your camera has a sensor with color filters in front of the picture element sensors. Neither the filters nor the pixel element sensors are exactly identical across that camera, let alone any other camera.

Why? We can’t manufacture either filters or pixel elements “to perfection” … they are reasonably close … and buying a $75,000 Red or Sony simply gets you a rig that the sensor tested better than most others off the same line. (The same goes for all the other electrical components in the camera. They’re real close, but not identical … )

Therefore no two “identical” cameras will capture the same exact image data from the exact same scene, even if you transfer the lens between them. It will be closer than other cameras, but not identical.

On the display end, the same thing happens. No two “identical” monitors, calibrated by the same hardware/software, sitting side by side, showing the identical signal from an external box like from AJA or BlackMagic to keep the OS and GPU out of the ‘picture’ … will show an identical image to human eyes.

This has been demonstrated over and over again by top color scientists. And further, the human eye/brain system is very different person to person. Everyone in the room with the above monitor pairs will see different image problems between the two monitors. One will see a light pink in the upper left, another will swear the entire left side is somewhere between pink and green, both comparing that to the middle of the screens.

So … lose the idea there is a perfect, proper color and density that will be the same in all monitors or screens. It simply cannot happen. And trying to get there will eventually land you in an insane asylum. Or a prison cell.

Now what do you do? Well, accept Reality. The Mac monitors,  but only those Mac monitors without Reference mode option set to HDTV … will as Kevin’s article use a display profile of gamma 1.96 … but wait, there’s more! They also do not exactly correctly remamp Rec.709’s sRGB color primaries to the Mac monitor’s P3 color space primaries. So they’re off both in contrast/black-white points, and color hue fidelity. Great job Apple!

But Mac monitors with the Reference mode option, set to HDTV, will use the correct by the standards gamma 2.4 display transform. So those Macs will use a different, darker display transform than your Mac.

Most Windows rigs will actually use gamma 2.4 for Rec.709 video display in most players, not the generally assumed “web gamma 2.2” which is universally used for still image in the sRGB color primaries. (From testing by major colorists and color scientists, not “what it looks like” … and I trust those people.)

Though some video players will use gamma 2.2, and some users tell their GPU or monitor settings to use gamma 2.2.

But the gamma 2.4 in the specs while grading IS ONLY WHEN WORKING IN A DARKENED ROOM. By the Rec.709 standards,  working in a rather dark-ish (but not blackened) room, which is done for best human eye capabilities for hue saturation, is the only time one should use gamma 2.4 for grading.

If doing grading in a generally normally lit room, by the Rec.709 standards, one is supposed to use a gamma 2.2 display transform.

Clear as mud? So you should be grading under a gamma 2.2 display setting in Premiere. Unless you’re got the darkened room I work in. 

And if at all possible, any evaluation should be done with a gamma 2.4 display in that pretty dark room.

All professionally produced Rec.709 broadcast and streaming is produced using those standards. No matter what screen it will be seen on. So everything you watch on your Mac that was professionally produced was produced by the standards.

Theatrical releases are a different beast and I’m just not going there.

The end reality is simple: your Mac and other Macs will use a different diplay transform depending on whether they have Reference modes and if those modes are set to on. You cannot change that. Or make any image that will look the same in both settings.

Past that, nearly all Android devices, TVs, and PC software will use a display gamma of 2.4 … and you can’t change that.

But remember no two screens are alike anyway, let alone looking at your iPad on a noon park bench and a dark bedroom at night. Every screen out there will show at least a slightly different image. You can’t change that either.

So simply grade as close to the standards as you can do, and let it go … as out In the Wild, you have no control what-so-freaking-ever! Which drives colorists around the bend until they learn to fugedaboudit.

Hello,

Please try this method: https://adobe.ly/3T4lcJV, then report back and let us know how it went.

Cheers,
Kevin