Color Management Panel

We hear your frustrations about color management and we are working on multiple improvements.

I recently posted a note on Alister Chapman's excellent xdcam-user.com ( http://xdcam-user.com ) forum, in response to a post he'd made about color management in Premiere Pro.

While my response doesn't go into details on our long term plans, it describes what we're doing in the short term to make handling of log footage easier.

Here's what I wrote:

Hi all,

I’m a product manager at Adobe, on the video team. I thought I’d chime in to provide some info on what we’re doing.

Color management is not going away – quite the opposite. As HDR-capable cameras and displays are becoming the default, and shooting in log or raw is becoming the norm, color management is critical. Gone are the days of only Rec709, the one color space to rule them all.

You might have seen reports about HDR iPhone media not looking good in Premiere Pro. And you might have seen the great video my friend Karl made to explain the issue: https://youtu.be/odwptnEhxJs ( https://youtu.be/odwptnEhxJs )

The problem occurs when HDR media is displayed on an SDR timeline. We’re attempting to squeeze wide color range footage into a small color space. Without a manual change, either to the footage or the timeline, the results look blown-out and bad.

Our vision for color management in Premiere Pro is simple. You can drop footage in any color space onto a sequence and we will automatically convert the colors and range with pleasing tone mapping, and provide controls to tweak the tone mapping. You don’t need a LUT, the result is likely to be more accurate than using a LUT, and there won’t be any concerns about clipping. Of course, if you’d prefer to work with a LUT, that workflow will still be supported.

Some of this is available now, like us recognizing some (but only some) color spaces. But that’s the problem with color management: it is complicated enough without having to worry about which pieces are available and which are not.

So, as we are adding the remaining pieces, finessing our math, and working out the user experience, we are first going to add an application preference. You’ll be able to choose whether you want Premiere Pro to automatically use the color space of your log footage or whether you’d prefer that it is treated as Rec.709. There’s more than one way to do color and by adding this preference, you’ll be in control of how you’d like Premiere Pro to work by default (a default you can easily override for specific clips).

Regards,

Fergus