Washed Out Colours on Export from Premiere Pro

He's wrong on several points.

First, there is no easy fix. Color managment differences on different systems and gear are the cause of the problems, and you simply can't get past those with an export LUT ... or any specific setting at all. Period.

Second, Premiere is not "full" or data range, never has been. Premiere was always (and still is) hardcoded to be viewed on systems with their monitors set to the broadcast standard of Rec.709 ... D65, sRGB primaries, gamma 2.4, brightness 100 nits.

And the data range used at any point on a sequence is set by the format/codec currently active in Premiere.

Nearly all format/codecs for Rec.709 media are "limited" or "video" range. Pretty much, unless you're dealing with a 12-bit codec or image sequence formats, your media is limited. And Premiere is designed to recognize the nature of the media and display that media correctly.

So it shows say DPX as full range, and mov/mp4 and nearly all ProRes and such as limited/video range. On the same timeline, if necessary.

And your GPU/monitor should be set to limited not full for this system to work properly. I've seen the demonstrations for colorists about all this, it's long and detailed, and well ... it just is what it is.

Set your GPU and monitor for "limited", "video", or "16-235" ... and it will show all proper Rec.709 media remapped to black to white, and will correctly show all image sequences/full range media correctly also.

Back to the color management issue. A pro colorist recently did a lengthy, detailed, need I say exhaustive bit of testing ... to see if there was some possible combination of things that would work across platforms, apps, players ... and no, there isn't.

Colorists setup their Grade 1 Reference monitors (those puppies start around $5K) with either internal LUTs or a LUT box 'tween the computer and the monitor, with a LUT created by a pro calibration software/puck combination. They spend more on their calibration software/gear than most of us do on our whole system. They DO NOT use ICC profiles to do so, as ICC profiles are problematic for handling things in any great detail. Especially noted for "volumetric" problems.

Then colorists send clips to clients for approval, who are watching on Heaven knows what device and viewing environment. And get responses back "but it looks red (subsititute anything here) on my screen ... fix it!". But the client is wrong ... their screen is the issue. And making it say less red on the client's screen is going to make it cyan on nearly all other screens watching it.

Again, this is due to poor application of color management standards across OSs and devices.

Apple didn't help when they came out with their beautiful Retina monitors, and ... changed their ColorSync utility handling of Rec.709 tagged media. They chose to apply the scene referred transform, but not the display referred transform that is the other half of that standard.

Premiere's engineers came out with their first user-control for color manangement two years ago in an effort to help Apple users. Setting the preferences option for Display Color Management tells Premiere to look for the ICC profile of a monitor, and attempt to remap the image accordingly in and effort to present a correct Rec.709 image on whatever monitor is in use.

Besides the massive limitations of ICC profiles for this ... it sort of mostly works, especially for general editing. And in fact, is wise for many PC users to use as well.

But it of course only helps within Premiere. Export a file, and ... the system will show it with whatever color management goods or bads it has, and all browsers and apps/players do different things with color management. No guarantee, if your system is not Rec.709 compliant all the way to the screen pixels, as to what you'll see outside Premiere.

Applying a LUT designed for Mac users to get around the Color Sync utility's improper half-application of Rec.709 means that file will look more like it did within Premiere for someone also on a Mac Retina, when they view in Safari, Chrome, or QuickTime player.

However ... on all other screens, it will be over-contrasty, probably too dark, and Heaven knows what the saturation will be.

Apple screens are what, 10% of the screens out there? This means that on the other 90%, your file will look worse. What a joy.

Resolve now has a Rec.709"A" tag, that you can apply on export. Which tells ColorSync to apply both parts of the Rec.709 functions, and voila, it looks better. Limitation, according to the colorist testing referenced at the beginning: this is only on Macs with Retinas made since 2017, on the newer Mac OSs, and in QuickTime, Safari, and Chrome.

It unfortunately makes the image worse on most PCs, and virtually all Android devices, and on FireFox and some players on Macs.

Which in final result is very similar to the export LUT option within Premiere referenced above.

Yea, it's frustrating ... and it really ticks off colorists. Color management should NOT be so freaking screwed up.

But as it is, you have to choose ... look probably better on the 10% of the screens out there that are Apple, or ... the rest of the screens.

It really is a user choice with no perfect result.

Neil

You need proper viewing conditions.  You can't avoid it.  That means a calibrated display and a hardware player.  Anything that can or will alter the signal - like software media players, GPU drivers, browsers, etc. - has to be nullified.