Color shifts in older projects

[Shamer]

Upgraded to 2018 and am having significant color changes when opening v.2017 projects.

In all previous upgrades, I've learned to keep a back-up of Lumetri LUT folders to utilize when upgrading Premiere and I did the same this time so this doesn't appear to be a LUT issue.  All clips where LUTs were used are accurately accessing the correct LUT, but EVERY clip (whether or not it had a LUT applied) have major issues with gamma.

Anyone else experiencing this?  This is on a Mac i7 running 10.11.6 - haven't upgraded the PC workstation to 2018 yet.  I usually wait as long as possible before upgrading any Adobe product but seemed like a safe bet right now on this machine.

Would also really like to understand why Adobe continues to cause endless headaches for users...  This has turned a simple "replace that one clip in that project from a few months ago" into an all day "fix the color in every clip" affair!

[Shamer]

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is the change I'm seeing - top one is from 2017 project, bottom one from 2018.  No LUT was used on clip, just Lumetri.  Only difference between the 2 is each was exported from different versions of Premiere...

[Jim_Simon]

Adobe engineers recommend against 'installing' LUTs to the package folders that come with PP.  Doing so will void any support.

Instead, create a LUT's folder in your Creative Cloud Files.  Browse to that location to apply the LUT, and it will be available in any version of both PP and AME on any machine you're signed into.

Having said that, what are the export settings used here?  What kind of media?  Do you see the issue if you start in 2018?

[Shamer]

Yes, I should have clarified that having an isolated LUT folder is my current 'best practices', but unfortunately I also have to accommodate projects that originated from before I found that recommendation.

(1) Export settings were to 1080 h264 with max render & bit depth checked... (2) Source media was a mix of 4K XAVC flavors, but that particular clip was XAVC-S and I observed the issue affected both XAVC-I and XAVC-S clips... (3) Issue persistent no matter how I played with Premiere - i.e. changing renderer, starting from fresh with Premiere launch, re-opening the original project again. etc.

I have possibly nailed it down to a couple of things - Black level adjustments and Shadow level adjustments in Lumetri.  The more dramatic the original adjustment was, the more pronounced the difference appeared.  IOW, comparing 2 clips with Lumetri color correction showed that if I had a clip with almost no Black/Shadow lifting performed on it then there was little to no perceptable difference between the v.2017 generated file and the v.2018 generated file.  However, once you got up to say an input of '4' for a black level in v.2018 Premiere, it would look drastically different from an input of '4' for the v.2017 version.  I would have to drop the v.2018 Black adjustment down to '1' to come close to matching what was previously a '4' level.   In the above clip, it had the Black level set to 10 & Shadow to 5 originally and when I eventually matched it back, it was Black at 3 and Shadow at 10 - implying not only value changes but maybe 'crossover' changes as well?

This is thoroughly unscientific, I wasn't looking at scopes yet, just going seat of my pants on several clips to see if it had anything to do with what I was seeing across them.  It seems like there may have been a change in v.2018 to how much an input to adjustments in Lumetri fields actually changes values in comparison to v.2017 Premiere.  Since I've only tested on one system with one project, I haven't confirmed.  When I have time, I can verify with my other workstation still running v.2017 but that might not be for awhile...

[R Neil Haugen]

Interesting to see the potential difference being in the Black level control. That's an odd control anyway ... here's a couple examples from my blog ...

---------------------------

And when dropping Blacks ...

--------------------------

So, have they changed the controls? Maybe I'll have to check that out ...

Neil

[jsyboy75]

Same issue, I have a project that took days to colour grade and now the colours have all shifted - do I have to grade it again?

WHY?!!

[R Neil Haugen]

Details ... what version was the original worked in?

What sorts of effects did you use?

What version are you working in now?

Neil