I work for/with/teach pro colorists. I'm in both Premiere and Resolve on a daily basis, and have been through the color management in both way, way down that rabbit hole. For years.
From reading through your post, it sounds like a very basic, and very natural, error ... you tried a bunch of different things, but never actually achieved a consistent color management setup to do what you wanted. No wonder you didn't nail things. (It's complicated and confusing to the max, btw.)
And yet, many thousands of people do this routinely with iPhone HLG media ... if you have the settings correct. Premiere 25.x can be used for a wide range of color workflows. It's pretty flexible, if not near perfet yet.
Although please understand this: HDR is still the Wild Wild West of video.
Very few screens out "there" (as a percentage of total screens) do any HDR at all. Those that do, do only one or two of the four-five competing HDR formats. And very, very few of those do the HDR they do supposedly support, well across the board.
Which makes HDR deliverables a bit of a nightmare, especially for web work. For broadcast and streaming, they do have pretty usable deliverable specs. The web is just nutso.
First, for HDR work, your monitor must support the format. And I would say, have at least 400 nits, which is rare in current monitors, most of which actually top out in the upper 300s. 600 nits is the absolute minimum for professional HLG workflows for color checking. 1000 nits is better. And actually required by about any broadcast/streaming service I know of.
And the only monitors that actually do 1,000 nits correctly are from Flanders FSI, Eizo, Konvision, and a few high-end Sony screens. They are ... expensive. Ahem.
Hokay ... to set color management in Premiere 25.x, go to the Lumetri Panel, Settings tab. The one NAMED Settings. All Premiere CM controls are there in one place, and that is where you can setup a unified color managment.
- Auto detect log, auto tonemapping, and Display Color Management all ON.
- Extended Dynamic Range option on if on a Mac.
- You want HDR, set the Working sequence to the desired option, either HLG or PQ.
- Set your Lumetri Scopes to their HDR settings, although you may want to use 10 bit scales in the scopes.
- Use an export preset matching your sequence CM ... for you, a preset with HLG in the preset name.
- Test by reimporting into Premiere ... does it match the view in Premiere? If so, it's good.
As to the differences in different players ... Premiere will probably be the most accurate view on your system, next to Resolve ... if you have your system and monitor settings correct. Do NOT set say video levels to full, period. Leave that setting at legal/video range or auto. IF you have that as an option.
SDR/Rec.709 gamma settings in Premiere and viewing outside of Premiere
Next, for Rec.709 media, Mac Retina monitors that don't have Reference modes use an incorrect viewing gamma, a display transform of roughly 1.96, instead of the correct, specified display transform of gamma 2.4. This means that Rec.709/SDR video on those screens is notably lighter and less saturated, especially in the shadows.
Macs with Reference modes set to HDTV, and all other viewing systems whether PCs, Android, TVs, and broadcast setups, use a display transform of roughly gamma 2.4. Which will show a darker, more saturated view than Macs without Reference modes.
And there ain't no fix possible. No "gamma compensation LUT" , as has been in the past used with Premiere, nor any NCLC tag changes, as is used in Resolve, can fix the problem across systems. You can make it better in one, and worse in the other, that's all you can do.
Premiere now has the Viewing Gamma setting. When working with Rec.709 outputs, set that to gamma 1.96/Quicktime, Premiere's program monitor and transmit out will match to what a Mac without reference modes using gamma 1.96 displays. But only in QuickTime Player, Chrome, and Safari.
VLC and Potplayer normally show closer to a 'proper' Rec.709 gamma 2.4 transform image. So they will be darker and more saturated. As would be seen on non-Mac screens, and on Macs with Reference modes.
In SDR workflows, there is no possible setting that works both "sides". Yea, that's a pain.
In HDR, it's normally far less of an issue. But of course, HDR is still the Wild Wild West as noted above. And both you and your client need to work on "similar" capability screens, in similar room brightness settings.
A Colorist's Required Caveats
Understand something off the bat: no one will ever see exactly what you see on your screen, period.
You have never, ever in your life, seen exactly what a pro colorist saw. No matter how viewed, movie theater, broadcast TV/streaming, home DVD, online. It isn't possible.
As has been demonstrated, even two "identical" monitors, sitting side by side, calibrated by high-end spectros, and fed the same signal from a Decklink card, will not have an identical appearing image. Now change the screen maker, the room, and ... it's nowhere the same.
This makes getting client buy-in a massive headache for pro colorists. Most of whom put in their pricing sheets the requirement that all color/tonal decisions are only accepted when made from viewing on certain screens in certain conditions. I know some who have a stack of a certain high-end iPads, that have extra color controls, and are set to as closely as possible match the Reference monitors in their suites.
They loan those to the client, who needs to use them in a pretty dark but not black room. And hope to get them back at the end of the project, of course ...
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