Color shift when exporting to ProRes

You're hitting a well known and incredibly frustrating issue. And there's two ways to approach it. I'll explain the issue first.

The Rec.709 standards that broadcast uses and have been in use for all normal or "SDR" video for over a decade call for a number of very specific things. Including gamma 2.4 (2.2 permissible in bright-room working environment) and both the scene transform and the display transform added in Bt.1886 years ago.

Premiere follows those standards. As do essentially all full pro colorists with their thousands of dollars of gear. That's what all broadcast/streaming is built around. Except for the small amount of HDR content actually being delivered.

However, when Apple redid their Retina monitors a few years back they set their color utility, ColorSync, to use gamma 1.96 and to use only the scene tranform, and not the display transform.

So on a Mac, "color managed" apps that allow ColorSync to control the image show something that is not what you would see on a fully compliant Rec.709 system. And there isn't any easy way around it.

One approach to getting around this ... if your users you think are mostly Mac and you are only doing web stuff ...  you can apply a LUT in the export dialog to change the image so that outside PrPro on your Mac it looks like you'd like in say Chrome or QuickTime.

Another approach I've heard of is dropping an adjustment layer over the sequence with a Lumetri instance in it from a preset you've made. Designed to 'offset' the change by lowering contrast and saturation a bit. This way you then correct your clips to look good, and then disable the adjustment layer before export.

If you've set your Lumetri in the AL up right, then the exported file will look 'normal' in QuickTime and Chrome on a Mac.

Now ... either of those approaches will get you a file that will look fine on a ColorSync mangled app, but ... for a full Rec.709 compliant system, will typicallly be way too dark and over-saturated.

And at this point, you also should understand ... no colorist can 'solve' this problem either. Competing tech standards just clash, period.

But one thing colorists are aware of ... no one ever sees any program they grade exactly as they saw it when grading on their spendy reference monitor. Not. Ever.

Because every screen out there is different from every other, including if you have two identical monitors, calibrated, sitting side by side. And besides the differences in monitor hardware and ICC profiles and all, you have differences in viewing environment that do drastically affect perceived image contrast, color, and saturation.

That client will never see exactly what you've seen anyway. So maybe make it a bit closer, kinda too dark in Premiere and still a bit light in the shadows in QuickTime. And figure it will play acceptably in either place.

Neilr