MacBook Pro M1 Color Grading/Gamma shifting/Washed out Colors

If you're talking about the difference between "inside Premiere" and outside, on QuickTime player, Chrome or Safari browsers on a Mac ... that issue is the difference in color settings between the Apple ColorSync color management utility and the rest of the world.

The ColorSync CM app uses non-standard ... standards ... for viewing Rec.709/SDR media. They use a gamma of 1.96 rather than the specified 2.4, and they don't apply the display transform functioned required in standard Rec.709.

Between the two, the apps on a Mac that allow ColorSync to control CM will display the same file data differently than any system following Rec.709 standards.

I work with a lot of colorists, I teach pro colorists, and most of them are on Macs. And are ticked off at Apple about this whole issue. But of course none of them grades on a 'normal' computer monitor anyway, their reference monitors are things like Flanders rigs. All of them connected via BlackMagic or AJA breakout devices, never the GPU. So the OS doesn't touch the image file.

There isn't any way to "fix" a difference between display parameters. You can't make a file that looks differently depending on whether ColorSync is controlling things or not. And yea, that's a right royal pain.

But ... understand ... ColorSync is doing the same thing to every media you view on that Mac. Did you know that it is doing that same thing, brighter shadows/less color, to every pro media you watch via QuickTime Player, Chrome, or Safari? You aren't seeing those original files either, but I bet you haven't noticed a problem ... because you're used to your screen showing things as it shows them.

As does everyone else.

Neil